Breaking Barriers: The Quest for Accessible Science
Curiosity is one of the main drivers of Homo Sapiens.
What lies beyond these mountains? Why do two geographically distant animals share so many similarities? Why do the contours of South America and Africa look so complementary? Why does sealed food rot? Why does an offspring resemble its progenitors?
As we accumulate knowledge as a species, questions become more complex and pre-existing information becomes essential to uncovering the enigmas of this world.
Vast amounts of information have been accumulated through the ages, especially during the last four centuries. This has made the written record an essential tool for safeguarding this knowledge. In today’s world, essential foundational knowledge is acquired through mandatory schooling, while pursuing highly specialized information (say, in college) becomes a matter of personal choice. However, knowledge that extends beyond the compulsory school curriculum remains vital for a healthy society, as it plays a role in various aspects, from advancing agricultural techniques to combating human diseases.
With that in mind, how can a Homo sapiens in the 21st century satisfy its curiosity? Simple: either through personal experimentation or by reading the insights of others. Cutting edge research is published in scientific journals, yet gaining access to this knowledge presents at least two challenges: overcoming the (1) cost and (2) knowledge gap. Alternatively, one can resort to using a search engine such as Google, though this approach has its own issues. At each intermediary step, some degree of information is lost, creating a degrading process marked by layers of interpretation. This underscores the significance of science accessibility to humanity, as it serves as the gateway that satiates our innate curiosity.
Access to science is a multifaceted challenge, with two particular aspects being of significant relevance to the general public: the cost of acquiring an article and the knowledge gap that exists between authors and the rest of the population. Science accessibility is a mission that we at Intellart are extremely motivated to tackle.
This economic barrier has existed since before the first article was even published in a peer reviewed scientific journal[1]. Even when science was made accessible almost exclusively through books, there existed an economic impediment. For example, Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of the Species” in 1859, priced at 15 shillings, or approximately 95 US dollars in today’s money. For a similar price, a student can get an annual subscription to the journal Science, which publishes hundreds of scientific articles and letters each year. So, one can wrongly assume that scientific knowledge is more affordable in our time. However, research conducted in 2015[2] estimates that 2.5 million papers are published each year in thousands of scientific journals; and this number increases every year. Hence, staying up to date on a specific topic demands spending thousands of dollars on subscriptions to various journals. Consequently, science remains far from being cost-effective in the modern era despite it being only a click away.
The second barrier is the knowledge gap. Scientific articles are usually written for scientists and directed at a scientific and highly specialized audience. This is done for the purposes of brevity and is essential to have each scientific discovery explained in a few thousand words. Nonetheless, each word encompasses tens of hours of explanations to grasp its meaning and contextual relevance. In other words, each sentence in a scientific article contains much more information than just its 10–15 constituent words, and each concept used in the article may have books dedicated to it.
The early 2000s saw the beginning of a movement to make scientific research and its dissemination more accessible, known as Open Science. How does Open Science address the two aforementioned issues? As of today, its primary goal is to resolve the economic barrier problem, with the scientific community focused on making knowledge more affordable. In open access articles, readers are not required to pay any fees. Nevertheless, the complexity of the content remains challenging for the general public to comprehend. It is worth mentioning that some journals have introduced a section in scientific articles to stress the relevance of the discovery in a way that is accessible to the public. However, this is still done in a format that does not reach the masses.
A clear example of the difficulties of reaching different audiences with the same material is the work of Oliver Sacks and his research around L-DOPA. He published his studies with post-encephalitis patients in several editorial letters and scientific articles between 1970 and 1972[3]. These documents contained a few thousand words and were directed at physicians and scientists. However, to reach the general public, Sacks wrote about the individual medical stories in a book, narrating in detail each patient’s experience and explaining the concepts therein. This narrative approach gave the research a human perspective that captivated the public, and more so, Hollywood. On one side, the scientific articles themselves did not reach the masses, while on the other, the book was not well received by the scientific and medical community. One key takeaway from this is that we cannot address scientific issues and the dissemination of science to society using the same tools. At Intellart we are dedicated to create the tooling and solutions required to make science accessible to all. If you’re curious and eager to learn more about our journey toward this ambitious goal, take a look at our blog posts — you’re in for a fun ride!
“If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.” — Steve Jobs
References
[1] https://www.aje.com/arc/scholarly-publishing-brief-history/ (1731: Medical Essays and Observations, the first fully peer-reviewed journal, is launched by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.)
[2] https://www.stm-assoc.org/2015_02_20_STM_Report_2015.pdf
