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DTES RESEARCH
ACCESS PORTAL
You can help make research related to the Downtown Eastside more accessible
Inspired by International Open Access Week, the Downtown Eastside Research Access Portal (DTES RAP) team is launching a pilot collaborating with cIRcle, UBC’s open access institutional repository, to reach out to UBC authors to make eligible research openly available.
We’re also asking you to help identify other scholarship and/or community materials that might be relevant to the DTES RAP.
The theme of this year’s International Open Access Week is The Cost of Knowledge, which asks us to consider a fundamental tension: we create and share knowledge to advance human understanding and the common good, yet the costs and barriers to accessing that knowledge continue to grow. The question of who can access and share research, and who benefits when they can’t, has particular resonance in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). A Manifesto for Ethical Research in the Downtown Eastside, developed through the community-based Research 101 project, asks local researchers to think about who really benefits from their projects, and how they ensure findings will be returned to the community in respectful and meaningful ways.
This is why the DTES RAP exists. The DTES RAP contains materials collected with these principles in mind. This work is ongoing, as new materials about the Downtown Eastside are always being created.
Do you conduct research in or about the DTES? The DTES RAP and cIRcle teams have identified a number of candidate articles and our colleagues in cIRcle will be reaching out by email starting this month with offers of support to help make the research openly accessible.
But you don’t need to wait to hear from us. If you have produced scholarship you think could be relevant to the Downtown Eastside, please let us know. Making research open access is one part of ethical and reciprocal research practice. Helping to ensure that research is easy to find and accessible to the communities it concerns is one practical step researchers can take.
Know someone conducting research related to the DTES? Please share this invitation with them!
Know of important community reports or materials? We welcome suggestions for research articles, reports, videos, and community-generated materials that relate to the Downtown Eastside and are available online or in digital formats, whether or not they are affiliated with UBC. While we are able to make only eligible UBC research openly available through cIRcle, we can link to other materials in the DTES RAP. When we do so, we add metadata to the each item record, helping the items appear in relevant Internet searches and making them easier for anyone to discover.
Please share this invitation with others or send us suggestions for materials to include!
Background. The DTES RAP is part of the Making Research Accessible initiative, a collaborative effort co-led by the UBC Learning Exchange and UBC Library’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre to support greater access to research in and about the Downtown Eastside by bringing together academic and community-generated research so it is easier to discover and use.
