How accessible are open-access journal articles?

The world of science publishing is changing, dramatically. The internet has now produced a plethora on online-only journals that have been instrumental in aiding the distribution of the latest scientific results. So too has the relatively new idea of open-access journals. Traditionally, experiments and data were published in peer-reviewed subscription based journals. Most schools and libraries owned subscription plans to hundreds of titles and provided access to the employees so they could easily (and affordably) conduct their research and hence, do their jobs. In the late 2000s, things began to change. Funding agencies who provided the research dollars to conduct this research were getting increasingly frustrated that they had paid for this work to be done, but were unable to read the results of these efforts without shelling out a tidy sum to gain access to the journal. This opened the door for open-access journals and publishing. In 2008, the National Institutes of Health invoked a new policy: that the work paid for by NIH funds had to be “deposited” in a centralized database, PubMed Central, so that it was publicly available. Open-access journals that allow anyone with access to the internet to download a complete scientific article for fee, were born. Unlike traditional journals that charge a subscription fee, open access journals charge a review fee for each paper that is submitted for review. This way they can pay for the publication of the work without charging a subscription fee.

Although open-access journals provide access for everyone to the scientific research publishing on their pages, to some these research papers are far from accessible. Science is written in a very technical language, so while these journals provide access to the very scientific papers, few of these articles are translated into a more accessible language. This is not the fault of the scientists or the journals, but it does point to a need to convert this scientific information so a broader audience can appreciate the work that is being done. Open-access is a good idea, but maybe there should also be an open-access journal that helps review the science and translates it so it is more accessible to a much broader audience.