Scientists Owe Taxpayers Comprehensible Science

Scientists are often lauded as working toward the public good, so why are most scientific findings hidden within dense, jargon-filled texts? Federal agencies that fund science should hold researchers accountable for making their findings accessible and understandable to nonscientists.

From 2020 to 2023, the percentage of U.S. adults that have either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in scientists declined in spite of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (and potentially stemming from communication missteps therein). This bodes poorly for public favor of scientific evidence–based policies to address global health and environmental emergencies.

The federal government provides the majority of funding for academic research and development. The taxpayers whose money funds this research deserve to have easy access to the research findings. Accordingly, in August 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a memorandum stating that by the end of 2025, federal agencies should update their policies to ensure all publicly funded research papers are made accessible to the public for free without delay. This is part of a larger global movement toward making science open and accessible to all without barriers (including journal paywalls). However, simply having the ability to view a webpage with a journal article doesn’t mean that the work will be truly accessible. Scientific papers are highly technical and often include field-specific jargon that can be indecipherable to nonscientists and even to other scientists with expertise in different fields.

A fairer scientific enterprise would include easily accessible, layperson-friendly explanations of scientific research findings.

While federal funding agencies often require grant applicants to propose how their science will matter outside the lab, these measures are not enough. For example, many researchers who receive grants from the National Science Foundation are unable to deliver on all their proposed “broader impacts,” especially for impacts aimed at marginalized groups. The National Institutes of Health grant-review process includes criteria for significance and innovativeness, but not public outreach, which has sparked concern from some scientists. Notably, the inclusion of existing impact and significance criteria in grant applications doesn’t ensure that those impacts will actually result from the projects.

NSF Project Outcomes Reports and NIH Final or Interim Research Performance Progress Reports do require a public-aimed summary of findings and impacts, but these are only required at the completion of the funding (or at the time of funding renewal for interim reports). Additionally, outcomes are printed exactly as submitted by the awardee, which means that the level of comprehensibility for lay audiences can vary. Furthermore, these public-facing reports are posted in large grant information databases, which are not go-to sources for scientific information, even for scientists.

If these federal agencies truly want the science they fund to impact the lives of all citizens, they should require their grant recipients to disseminate their findings more regularly in easy-to-find places.

Less publicly minded scientists might argue that requiring direct lay audience communication would take time away from critical research tasks, but a case study of a Swiss sustainability research center suggests that performing outreach is not correlated with a reduction in publications or citations; instead, scientists who did certain types of outreach tended to have higher numbers of publications and citations. Furthermore, research papers that are shared through traditional press or social media have increased engagement and can help scientists expand their professional networks.

Even research scientists who don’t stray outside academia can benefit: nontechnical resources can help quickly prime them in key concepts in fields outside their expertise if their own projects veer in an unexpected direction.

Additionally, although research professors are busy keeping their labs running and bringing in funding, they are not usually the ones conducting the bulk of experiments and drafting papers: primary authors are often graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, or staff scientists. Outreach responsibilities could be conducted similarly, with the funded professors serving an advisory role to their trainee and employee scientists who have primary authorship.

As a minimum baseline for accountability, federal agencies could require publicly funded scientists to write jargon-free, plain-language summaries of their findings to accompany their academic publications. This communication medium could be reasonably documented and verified in annual research grant progress reports.

Ideally, these summaries could be maintained in a well-advertised government-hosted repository so that readers could have a centralized place to search for reliable information. For example, patients could search the repository for information about health conditions to help them make decisions about treatment options. This setup would eliminate concerns about the science being misrepresented in other media sources, since the summaries would be directly from the researchers.

Plain-language summaries are already beginning to grow in popularity, including within scientific publications. For example, the journal PLOS Medicine asks authors to answer a few key questions about the research for a general audience, and Taylor & Francis Expert Collection journals allow authors to publish plain-language summaries of publications as independently citable articles. However, this is not universal and not required by some of the highest-impact science research journals.

Notably, hosting research summaries in a government repository is a feasible goal, as it could be modeled after infrastructure that already exists for biomedical research. The NIH’s National Library of Medicine hosts the PubMed Central repository, which has more than 10 million research articles accessibly archived online, and PubMed (the broader repository of research paper citations and abstracts) already displays plain-language summaries if received from the publisher. This setup could be collectively implemented by all science funding agencies.

The creation and maintenance of such a repository would admittedly have financial costs, reducing availability of already competitive research grant funding (only about 21 percent of NIH research project grant applications get funded). But if the general public doesn’t trust scientists to produce safe and applicable results, how can we ensure that funded research will even be accepted and have the chance to yield positive impacts? The price of making science broadly welcome in public decision-making might be a slight reduction in funding, and we might just have to accept that.

Plain-language summaries alone will likely not be the holy grail for improving trust in scientists: They’re static texts that don’t communicate in a way that accounts for social contexts, emotions, values and learning styles. However, a study about psychology research plain-language summaries suggested that they were more comprehensible and resulted in better understanding than scientific abstracts.

Importantly, requiring scientists to write plain-language summaries of their papers is an actionable first step that government funding agencies can take to hold university scientists accountable to the very public that pays for their research. By making science truly approachable to all, we can pave the way for trust-building and encourage support for evidence-based decision-making.