Idea 16: Offering a secure research repository (5 mins)

Every day during September we will post up an idea for you to vote on.  The most popular ideas will become the things that the inaugural Organizing Committee of the Critical Physiotherapy Network focuses on in 2015.  So please make sure you cast your vote at the bottom of each post.

One of the most astonishing things I’ve learnt in setting up this group has been the amount of critical research that people are doing in physiotherapy that I had absolutely no idea about.  Now I don’t think of myself as someone who ignores other people’s research, or as someone who is particularly selective about what they read.  And I don’t think that my curating skills are so bad that I wouldn’t see a prime piece of critical thinking if it appeared on my computer one day.  The problems I face are probably the same problems we all face these days; the shear volume of research and the difficulty of filtering out the wheat from the chaff.

Here’s one example of a revelation I had a few weeks ago when I had some correspondence with one of the network’s participants.  Målfrid Råheim is professor of physiotherapy at the Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, University of Bergen in Norway.  I had heard of Målfrid’s research and used a paper she had collaborated on for a lecture I had given to one of our second year student groups (Øien, Råheim, et al, 2009), but I had no idea just how much research Målfrid had done.  When I saw Målfrid’s CV, I was frankly a little embarrassed to see how much research she and her team were doing that I had absolutely no idea had been published.  Here is a sample of Målfrid’s publications for the last two years:

You’d have to agree it’s a pretty impressive list, and I know for a fact that there is research here I can definitely use in my teaching and further research.  But I couldn’t help thinking how much better it would be if we had all of these articles held in secure storage so that people within the group could access them easily.  Of course, copyright issues discourage us from setting up our own archive, but there are now a growing number of Internet resources that side-step these issues and offer papers up regardless (see Library Genesis, for example).

So should we offer our members a secure repository to make other member’s research readily available?

Reference

Øien AM, Råheim M, Iversen S, Steihaug S. (2009). Self-perception as embodied knowledge – changing processes for patients with chronic pain. Advances in Physiotherapy, 11, 121-129.

Post update: please note that voting closed on 7 October 2014 (results are available here), but please feel free to post your comments in the space below.

Since this idea was first published in September 2014, work is underway to develop a network eLibrary of resources for members to access online.