Accessibility

The principle of accessibility refers to ensuring that all who are interested are able to consume, evaluate, and otherwise interact with research products (e.g. data, results) and processes (e.g. methods). Even when research is transparent and has integrity, if only a limited group can access the outcomes or outputs of this research, it is not truly open.

Asking people to pay to read a hidden recipe for the best cake ever means that only certain people will be able to afford to make it. This may not seem like the end of the world for cake, because cake is a luxury. We might even hope that the reason the recipe is behind a paywall is so that the author of the recipe can be paid for the hard work they put into developing it, as well as covering the costs to the website of editing and hosting the content. However, research is a bit different.

One reason for this is that the outputs of research are not a luxury, as research is used predominantly to solve the world’s problems! Another reason is that much research is publicly funded, meaning the public has a right to access the products of this research. Also, when research is behind a paywall (e.g. published in a journal where you have to pay to access articles), authors don’t get any of the money that people pay to read the article.

If authors want to make their article openly available to everyone, they usually have to pay for this themselves. That’s like a recipe creator either having to pay to have their recipe openly listed on a website, or the website charging for people to read the recipe which the recipe creator gave them for free.

Accessibility is about more than just making the products of research available for free. Even if all research articles were free to read, if the public isn’t able to understand them, then they are useless! Converting a complicated recipe into bullet points, adding hints and tips, and translating it into different languages or adapting it for different accessibility needs, will mean that many more people are able to make the same recipe than if only the original version is provided.