Let’s face it, scientific papers are not written for a general audience. As much as we try to avoid it, they are full or jargon and aimed at scientists. This makes science inaccessible to a big part of the population, because our results are difficult to understand and sometimes just plain boring to read. This is why I have decided to launch “Human readable abstracts”, a series of blog posts to communicate my science to a wider audience.

The idea for this series of blog posts came to me a while ago, when I was thinking about what open access in science really means. Sure, publishing articles that are not locked behind a paywall is the first step in that direction, but open access fees can be very expensive. An alternative, which is what I usually do with my papers, is to publish a preprint of the article (the draft that is going to be submitted to the journal) before sending it for publication, or a postprint (the revised version after peer review) after acceptance of the article by a journal. The advantage of the preprint compared to the postprint is that your research can get out into the world a lot sooner and start receiving feedback.

I am a huge fan of preprints, but is a preprint enough to make my science accessible? Scientific papers, even if freely downloadable, may still be inaccessible to people outside your field of research or, if you are a very good science writer, to people who are not scientists. Scientific publications can be very long and are written in a style that is often quite boring; we try to avoid using jargon, but there are certain concepts that we assume every scientist will be familiar with (for example statistical concepts). You should not need to have a science degree to be able to read about science.

Sure, there are professional journalists whose job it is to communicate other people’s research, but sometimes findings can be reported incorrectly as accuracy is sacrificed to make a headline. Plus, I like the idea of communicating my own research regardless of whether my results are interesting enough for the press. The ability to express complex concepts to a generic audience is a very valuable skill that every scientist should be trained in. Unfortunately the majority of us are not. With the blog posts series Human readable abstracts I will try to improve my communication skills and expand the reach of my research to anyone who is interested in sustainability and nature conservation, independently from your education qualifications.

I hope you will enjoy reading about my research and keep an eye on this space, the first human readable abstract will be live soon!