Simplifying Scholarly Abstracts for Accessible Digital Libraries

Making science more accessible remains a challenge even with much effort devoted on the producer and publisher side. As content producers, researchers are encouraged to engage directly with the public, either through social media (Davies, 2008; Hara et al., 2019; Knox and Hara, 2021) or by crafting more digestible manuscripts in research (Maurer et al., 2021) and practice (Grene et al., 2017). Funding agencies and renowned journals also encourage the communication of scientific findings in accessible language. For instance, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) advocate "clear and simple" principles when communicating with audiences with limited health literacy, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) requires authors to submit a significance statement accessible to non-experts (Berenbaum, 2021; Pool et al., 2021). As scientific research progresses with increased specialization and interdisciplinarity, it is acknowledged that the use of jargon effectively reduces communication costs among domain experts, particularly those responsible for reviewing submissions. This specialized language, however, can become incomprehensible to those without a similar research background. While efforts to share scientific findings in more accessible language from the producer side are gaining traction, widespread adoption is unlikely in the near future due to the inherent conflicts between the specialized nature of scholarly communication and the public-oriented dissemination of scientific findings. Within this effort to create understandable research findings and open science to broader communities, libraries--and our digital libraries in particular--have a role to play. Driven by this idea, we propose to start by improving the readability of abstracts from scholarly works through automated rewriting.