Policymakers don't have access to paywalled articles

Adam Jones

Personally

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5 January 20255 January 2025

tldr: Government policymakers want to read research, but lack journal access. Your research needs to be open access if you want policymakers to read it, and you should prefer citing open access resources to improve epistemic legibility.

Policymakers don’t have access

Many seem to assume that government policymakers would have ready access to relevant scientific research.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. At multiple major US and UK government departments, the EU and the UN, staff often can't access the academic papers they need for their work. This sadly even includes those directly responsible for science and technology policy.

In one case, I heard that a Chief Scientific Advisor had to rely on Sci-Hub to get papers. In another, I heard a ministerial office’s policy of taking on interns was driven by wanting to use their university credentials to access papers.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, this became particularly apparent. Someone close to response efforts told me that policymakers frequently had to ask academic secondees to access research articles for them. This created delays and inefficiencies during a crisis where speed was essential.

Policymakers would benefit from access

Evidence-based policymaking requires access to evidence. Direct access would let policymakers validate claims and follow citation trails themselves. This especially matters when evaluating uncertain or conflicting recommendations.

The usual counterargument is that research flows through a pipeline: academic journals to think tank pieces to government policymakers. Think tanks can add value here by: filtering out noise, translating academic writing to policy speak, and analysing the policy implications of the science.

While this can work, it fails in several scenarios:

• It adds delays. This is particularly bad in crises, where this model usually breaks down. Science and technology policy also often moves quickly, so even in non-crisis situations policymakers really need more up-to-date information.
• Some challenges like tackling catastrophic AI or biosecurity risks have few think tanks creating these nice policy summaries.
• Many think tanks lack journal access or spread themselves thin across many areas, which can result in much lower quality, confused content compared to the original pieces. And then policymakers develop misunderstandings which they aren’t able to check because they can’t access the original articles.

Policymakers would use this access

Another rebuttal I sometimes get when mentioning this to people is that policymakers wouldn't read research even if they had access.

My experiences suggest otherwise for many of the most impactful decision-makers. Multiple policymakers have expressed frustration at their lack of access, and their actions demonstrate genuine demand:

• Making good use of open access papers
• Having high-quality discussions about recent arXiv pre-prints
• Using departmental expense policies err… creatively
• Borrowing access from university interns or secondees
• Reaching out directly to paper authors
• Resorting to Sci-Hub

While not every policymaker will always dive deep into the literature, those most committed to evidence-based policy currently face artificial barriers to doing their jobs effectively. It’s possible that many more would use research if there weren’t trivial (or quite real) barriers here.

Recommendation: Make your work open access

Given the above, I think this means publishing your work open access is important. This doesn’t necessarily mean ‘formally open access in a journal’, all the following things count:

• Uploading to a pre-print server like arXiv
• Self-publishing on your own website or blog
• Sharing your article, or a summary of it, on a forum like LessWrong

I also think to reap more of the benefits, you should:

• Write in plain English and for the web. You don’t need to write like an academic! If you have to write badly to publish it in a journal, you can write an easy-to-read summary.
• Prefer citing open access resources where possible. I’ve seen a tendency for writers to cite academic papers (that are usually paywalled) for credibility. As someone who has worked across several government teams, I’ve never seen this to be much of an important factor - instead, it usually just means a dead end for research.¹

  Government policymakers are unfortunately also incentivised to cite ‘reputable-seeming’ resources over the ones they actually used to come to that opinion. This makes it appear externally like these are relied on to come up with policy.

  But realistically a lot of government policy gets made based on travelling down interesting blog articles, Twitter threads and preprints from ‘everyday’ authors.

  Policymakers come to ideas, the report gets written, then citations are swapped out near the end of the process for final publication (I have it on good authority that comms teams prefer that you don’t state the government is getting its key policy ideas from Twitter user @BakedBureaucrat420).

  As someone once approximately said (probably John Godfrey Saxe), “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”

  (There are also more systemic solutions like making sure governments have access to journals, or forcing more work to be open access e.g. through funding requirements. But these aren’t the focus of this post.)