Open access vs Public access the case for democratic outreach in academic communication

Article written by Luke Tyler

“this is my answer: not that I loved Caesar less, but I loved Rome more” Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene II

Open access (OA) publishing has revolutionized the dissemination of academic research, enhancing the accessibility and impact of scholarly work. The movement began in the early 2000s with initiatives like the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003). These foundational statements advocated for the free availability of research outputs online, challenging traditional subscription-based models that restricted access to academic content.

The benefits of open access are manifold. It democratizes knowledge by making research freely available to anyone with an internet connection, thereby supporting global education and innovation. Researchers, particularly those from developing countries, gain equal access to cutting-edge findings without financial barriers. Open access also enhances the visibility and citation rates of authors’ work, as studies show that freely accessible papers are more likely to be read and cited. Furthermore, OA publishing accelerates scientific progress by facilitating quicker dissemination and collaboration among researchers across disciplines and borders.

While the move towards open access and its benefit to the wider scientific community is laudable, it comes at a cost—a cost, like most publishing costs in academia, that is ultimately funded by the general public. In 2023, approximately 45% of academic papers were published as open access. This figure represents a continuation of the growth trend seen in open access publishing over the past decade. This figure is based on all OA models: fully open access (gold), green (self-archived), bronze (free to read without a clear license), and hybrid models. Approximately $2.25 billion of public funds were spent to make those academic papers open access.

So what does our tax-paying public get for $2 billion a year? The answer, unfortunately, is not a lot. My favourite George Bernard Shaw quote covers the difference between the English and the Americans: “two countries separated by a common language.” Whilst this may be true of the English and our transatlantic cousins, it also perfectly describes the relationship between the publishing of academic papers and the public that fund that research. Over a decade in science communications, I’ve helped researchers and organizations communicate their work across innumerable boundaries, not only linguistic but cultural, contextual, and religious.

From working with the World Health Organization to outreach healthcare research to the Bedouin, working with the Canadian government to facilitate the inclusion of First Nation people in fishing research, or a particularly memorable project working with the Director of Conservation and Research for Wildlife SOS to communicate his research on Sloth Bear behaviour to Indian villagers. Every conversation has begun with the phrase, “In my experience, researchers and academics are often the people that find it hardest to write for a lay audience.” I’ve said this on a thousand calls, written it into lectures and speeches, and in ten years, I can count the researchers who’ve disagreed on the fingers of one hand.

It’s not just the general public that struggles to understand academic language either. Alan Sokal’s particularly famous piece of academese, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” while being primarily notorious as an academic hoax meant to expose the lack of intellectual rigor in cultural studies, was also an amazing work of nonsense writing. We have these adventures in academese every few years with wearying regularity, from AI-generated gibberish papers to completely made-up fields of physics. If academics can’t manage to communicate their way through this problem, what chance does the public really have? From ever-changing acronyms to the chasm of assumed knowledge, meaningful public access to academic work is only achievable by using clear, descriptive, jargon-free language. I think Feynman said it best: “I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.”

It’s difficult to think of a better example of the value of public vs. open access than a recent piece published in Scientia by the amazing climate scientist and Nobel prize winner Gary Yohe – link. Modern climate science is in the news and the global consciousness more than ever, and the public debate is dominated by tabloid coverage of disruptive protests or outright denials sponsored by bad faith actors, based on little or no science. What you see in the piece above is creative commons content, based on research by a luminary in his field, with conclusions drawn from peer-reviewed OA research that gives the public the opportunity to form opinions based on rigorous research presented in easily understandable language.

In 2022, over 5 million academic papers were published, up nearly 3% from 2021, and with estimates of between a 5% and 7% increase in 2023. Perhaps more strikingly, however, is the fact that over the last decade there has been an increase of almost 30%, with the number of new journals created each year approaching 1,200 in 2024. What does this mean for individual researchers and the open access landscape in general? The publishing landscape is becoming more specific, with numbers of reads on individual papers decreasing and access to journal subscriptions taxing already stretched university budgets. The hard reality is that the average OA paper published in a tier-one journal will receive fewer than 500 reads. Of those 500 potential reads, our own research suggests that fewer than 5% will be generated by standard (non-Google Scholar) internet searches. The process of search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex one, and the task of making OA content visible and available to the general public is one that academic journals have comprehensively failed at. In the same way that a tree falling in the forest goes unheard, a paper published online without proper SEO will go unread by its potential wider public or transdisciplinary audience.

So what does public audience public access content look like? In simple terms, the potential engagement for public access content is almost limitless. Our team at Scientia took this OA paper published in the Astrophysical Journal link and created this article for Scientia link. It currently sits at 5-figure reads on our website, has generated over 1.9 million impressions on Twitter, and the original OA piece now has downloads in the thousands. There is an immense unserved audience waiting to engage with academic publishing; all we as researchers need to do is provide public access.

Perhaps the best case I can make for funding teams like ours to work with SEO for academic publishing is this: The most highly searched and funded subject in science communications is healthcare; most of those visits are patients or the family of patients. People looking for answers, for research, often for hope. They often don’t know the right terminology, they don’t search for oncology or neurodegenerative decline, they search for cancer and Alzheimer’s, and they deserve to have available the best, most current answers research may have available.

The total NIH budget in the US in 2023 was $47.7 billion, another $9.54 billion went to the NSF. Here in Europe, the Horizon project will run to over $16 billion, with individual countries such as DFG in Germany and UKRI running billion-dollar research budgets. A conservative estimate will see well over half a trillion dollars in taxpayers’ money spent on global research. A system of Public Access whereby the results of that spending are available free of cost, easily understood, and have mainstream visibility is a moral duty.

To paraphrase another great social revolution, “there should be no taxation, without public dissemination.”