Do people outside of universities want to read peer-reviewed journal articles?

I asked a question on Twitter about whether or not people actually tried to read the peer-reviewed journal articles (not just the media releases), and if they encountered paywalls when they tried. This is what happened:

[Click on the time/date to see the conversation]

In case you don’t want to read through the whole conversation, it turns out that every person who answered the question said that they have in the past tried to access peer-reviewed journal articles, and that they have been stopped by paywalls. Some said it happened all the time.

There is very little evidence to show the prevalence of access and blocked access by the “interested public” for peer-reviewed journal articles. Some people seem to assume that only other scientists (or whatever) would be interested in their work, or that everything the “public” need to know is contained in a media release or abstract.

I think the results tell us a lot about the consumption of information by the wider community, the importance of scientific communication, the problem with the myth that only scientists want to read scientific articles, and the great need for free and universal access to all published research.

So far, I’ve been collecting whatever evidence I can get my hands on to relate to this question, especially in medicine, and I’ll add these pieces one by one below, just in case you are interested.

1. Open access articles are downloaded and viewed more often than other articles, even when they do not confer a citation advantage. This is seen as evidence that people not participating in publishing are accessing the information.Davis, P.M., Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing. The FASEB Journal, 2011. 25(7): p. 2129-2134.
2. A Pew Internet Report found that one in four people hit a paywall when searching for health information online. Perhaps more importantly, that 58% of all people have looked for health information online (and in a country where only 81% use the Internet).
   http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Health-online/Part-One/Section-9.aspx
3. From a UNESCO report on the development and promotion of open access: “First, it is known that [people outside of academia] use the literature where it is openly available to them. For example, the usage data for PubMed Central (the NIH’s large collection of biomedical literature) show that of the 420,000 unique users per day of the 2 million items in that database, 25% are from universities, 17% from companies, 40% from ‘citizens’ and the rest from ‘Government and others’.”Swan A. Policy guidelines for the development and promotion of open access, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2012, Paris, France. (Page 30). Available at:  http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/publications-and-communication-materials/publications/full-list/policy-guidelines-for-the-development-and-promotion-of-open-access/Of course, people accessing PubMed Central from domestic IP addresses might often be academics working late at night at home without a VPN (like I am doing now).

About fifty people responded to my question on Twitter. I realise that my audience is probably biased towards the highly-educated, informed, younger, and information-savvy, but I think there are clear and obvious groups of people outside of universities who would be interested in reading published research. These people include doctors, engineers and developers, parents of sick children, politicians and policy-makers, practitioners across a range of disciplines, museum curators, artists, and basically everyone with an interest in the world around them. That this aspect of open access hasn’t been the feature of many surveys or studies seems bizarre to me.

Perhaps most importantly, I think we need to know a lot more about just how often people outside of academia want to access published research, and if problems with access are stopping them from doing so.

Surely the impetus to move towards universal and open access to published research would grow if more academics realised that actually *everyone* wants access to the complicated equations, to the raw data and numbers, and to the authors’ own words about the breadth and limits of the research that they have undertaken.