Lay summaries of open access journal articles: engaging with the general public on medical research

This study investigates attitudes to ‘lay’ or ‘plain-English’ summaries of open-access journal articles in the context of engaging the public with medical research. It places lay summaries in the wider contexts of patients’ information-seeking behaviour and open access publishing activities. It reports the results of qualitative research involving two stakeholder groups: employees of organisations with a stake in communicating open access medical research to the public, and members of the public who have experience of accessing online medical research. It shows that patient access to the research literature is seen as one of a number of important sources of information that can help them manage their health conditions as ‘informed patients’. However, accessing the literature was reported to be problematical, particularly because of paywalls, and there were also difficulties in using it, including language barriers. Lay summaries were seen to make a helpful contribution to improving patient access to information. There is, however, a clear need to gather more evidence about the costs and benefits of such an approach and also on the potential ways in which open access can create benefits for the general public.