Scholarly Communicaton

Rachel Borchardt, Ameet Doshi, and Christina Miskey

Trust Us, but We Forgot to Tell You Why

The Role of Open Access in the Age of Societal Impact

Rachel Borchardt is scholarly communications librarian at American University, email: borchard@american.edu. Ameet Doshi is assistant university librarian for social Sciences and head of Stokes Library at Princeton University, email: ameet.doshi@princeton.edu. Christina Miskey is research impact librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, email: christina.miskey@unlv.edu.

© 2026 Rachel Borchardt, Ameet Doshi, and Christina Miskey

Recent developments in federal funding over the past two years have highlighted that eroding trust in higher education and the research it produces has contributed to a dangerous narrative, increasingly reflected in public and political discourse, that research institutions hold little to no value for the general public or the communities they serve. The sudden precarity of federal funding has led to a greater urgency to showcase societal impact of research.

For more than two decades, advocates for open access (OA) publishing have been shouting from the rooftops about the benefits of publishing OA and how open publishing increases the broader impact of research. This is not a new argument within universities and research institutions—in fact, communicating and sharing the advancements of research performed at a public institution, the benefits of initiatives such as service-based learning and community-engaged partnerships, and more has been a well-known struggle. Librarians and academics alike have argued that these movements are hugely beneficial to the public, particularly in times of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The problem arises when considering the infrastructures surrounding research translation and communication—many institutions have been slow to build mechanisms to get the research to the public to show its benefits or potential benefits, nor are there ways to systematically measure success.

The need for research institutions to move beyond more traditional measurements of impact is well known. Tools and systems have been developed to try and meet this growing desire to track societal impact,¹ yet their adoption has been slow due to a variety of challenges, particularly the need to rewrite tenure and promotion requirements.² Here we will dive briefly into some of these challenges, highlight areas of success, and discuss the potential opportunities that could offer to bridge the gaps between the “ivory tower” of academic institutions and the general public.

Research Translation Mechanisms

Research translation is the general term for the process of applying or “translating” the results of academic research to outside audiences. For example, news media regularly report on the results of academic research. This can happen through institutional press releases, which generate interest in the subject, through a reporter or journalist finding and reporting on original content, or through academics writing pieces designed for a larger community. One such example of academic-authored news is The Conversation, a nonprofit news organization aiming to “[democratize] knowledge by helping academic experts to write for the public.” The editors solicit scholars to share their ideas by writing in a journalistic style that encourages larger uptake and broader dissemination of their scholarship via social media and institutional news outlets.

The Conversation is one kind of interstitial connective tissue that can incentivize greater public uptake of OA scholarship. For scholars wishing to reach more specialized audiences, more specific translation efforts are needed that must match the needs of that community to achieve success. Researchers must actively share the results of community-based research directly with that community to ensure impact and uptake; releasing a report on a research website or institutional repository is too passive.

Practitioners and experts routinely make use of academic findings—without translation—but lament the lack of access.³ OA is a vital bridge, but information access and its use are crucial components of a well-functioning and knowledgeable society. Yet empirical analyses of the public use of OA shows that many hobbyists, citizen scientists, and individuals seeking answers to medical and other questions appreciate access to peer-reviewed publications.⁴ There is a thirst for knowledge among the public, and the availability of the best available scientific evidence and scholarly outputs from across disciplines is crucial for broadening societal understanding about our changing world.

The question becomes not whether the broader public outside of research communities are interested in access to scholarly knowledge but rather what are the ideal pathways to this access? Google (even if “enshittified”⁵) is a natural starting point for most, but too often the initial results of any search are SEO driven, relegating OA repositories of scholarly work to the dusty digital shelves of subsequent pages. Links to OA reports and papers sometimes are shared via social media or on Reddit forums and more systematically via Wikipedia.

Incentive Mechanisms and Impact Measurement

Researchers and stakeholders increasingly understand the importance of ensuring that academic findings can be used more broadly and are often eager to make a difference in public spheres. However, promotion, reappointment, and tenure (PRT) values scholarly impact above all else. Documents that govern these procedures are owned by the researchers in an academic unit, but they are notoriously slow to account for changes in academia. Groups such as PTIE, ARIS, HELIOS, Campus Compact, and DORA all urge reform in different areas that are currently undervalued by PRT documents, but without widespread and universal changes, many researchers, particularly senior-level researchers, rely on the measures of success that have propelled their own careers and are wary of updating institutional criteria that differ significantly. Any serious efforts to reform the way in which researchers are evaluated and rewarded for research must account for this unresolved issue.

There are areas of overlap between current evaluation methods and the broader goals of societal impact. A recent study⁶ shows that publications in most disciplines have now reached a majority open access for the first time ever. Several have found a degree of correlation between publishing OA and an increase in citation counts (the Open Access Citation Advantage, or OACA⁷). Academics, practitioners, and the general public tend to cite what can be easily accessed. Studies show that policymakers and journalists also tend to cite and rely on OA publications.⁸ Recent studies have been able to track the OACA over time and have found that researchers tend to be able to access OA research sooner (as soon as the article is accepted on the publisher’s site or via an OA repository), which can lead to a visibility advantage.⁹ This additional attention can contribute to greater societal impact and can also lead to a bump in scholarly citations for OA publications, causing an effect where increasing attention leads to citations, which leads to potential for more attention and potentially more citations. This can be seen as a kind of “passive” form of research translation—simply making research OA means a variety of audiences outside academia can use it, enabling broader reach and impact without additional effort.

Barriers and Looking Ahead

Lack of standardization is another barrier. Citations provide the basic metric upon which journal prestige metrics, like Journal Impact Factor, is treated as a measure of prestige in academia, but there are no standards for what prestigious public impact looks like. Some specialized frameworks exist¹⁰ for specific disciplines, areas, or types of research, providing ways to gather evidence of societal impact, but these are far from universal. Clarivate has released Research Intelligence, based on a homegrown framework to categorize societal impact in six areas, and Altmetric gathers alternative metrics including policy document citations and mentions in news articles, but neither provide a framework to contextualize or describe these metrics in a broader context.

The lack of a researcher- and librarian-driven approach to standardizing societal impact is a barrier to adoption, which limits the capacity to analyze societal impact using quantitative data. Accurately measuring such activities requires new typologies and considerations of what “societally beneficial” entails. Economistic approaches that have centered on the benefit-cost ratio of OA simply do not fit neatly into the everyday use of scholarly information. Integration of such knowledge into society is multidimensional and thus challenging to categorize into neat boxes.

Instead, assessing societal impact currently relies heavily on qualitative storytelling, which is useful for individual stories of impact but does not advance university-level societal impact initiatives, which often rely on measurable goals and benchmarking. The implementation of reliable measures such as survey-based dashboards (currently in development by the authors) would go a long way toward bolstering qualitative stories of societal impact with measurable quantitative metrics. That said, there is significant opportunity for librarians to advocate for meaningful change at multiple levels.

Library Involvement

Libraries and library workers have spent many years advocating for OA, internally within their own institutions, professionally as a priority for academic librarian research, and more broadly with publishers and financial models to support OA publishing. The rising demand for showing societal impact gives new importance to these efforts, and libraries can and should discuss the societal impact of OA with researchers at their institutions. The role of societal impact in the evaluation of research, though a much larger issue, is also one that benefits from the voice of many library workers. Joining national efforts to reform PRT while also advocating for better and more diverse measures of research impact beyond quantitative measures of scholarly impact will allow us to better capture the “true” impact of OA while also creating meaningful opportunities for our institutions to showcase their impact outside academia as well as their value to society.

Conclusion

Now more than ever, it is critical for research institutions to be able to communicate how and why the importance of their work should matter to funding organizations, the general public, and other communities they seek to reach. The struggle in this continues to lie within finding the balance between the existing infrastructure of academia and the movement toward finding broader and more inclusive solutions of measurement. This shift provides for a natural overlapping connection point between libraries and central administrative offices, such as the Office of Research and the Provost.¹¹ Libraries are well positioned to offer expertise through educating about the benefits of OA, providing access to licensed and open-source tools, sharing insights into more inclusive systems of evaluation and advocating for changes in our own PRT documentation.

Notes

1. Emily J. Ozer et al., “Scan of Promising Efforts to Broaden Faculty Reward Systems to Support Societally-Impactful Research,” 2023, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/white-papers/2023/10/universities-take-promising-steps-to-reward-research-that-benefits-society; Diana Hicks et al., “Widespread Use of National Academies Consensus Reports by the American Public,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 9 (2022): e2107760119, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107760119; Academic Leadership & Faculty Affairs, “The Boyer Model of Scholarship at Boise State University,” Academic Leadership & Faculty Affairs, n.d., accessed August 4, 2026, https://www.boisestate.edu/academics-deptchairs/home/tenure-promotion-overview/the-boyer-model-of-scholarship-at-boise-state-university/; Bernard Becker Medical Library, “Becker Medical Library Model for Assessment of Research Impact,” Becker Medical Library, 2018, https://becker.wustl.edu/impact-assessment/model.

2. I. Anguyo, “Faculty Promotion Guidelines Should Account for a Wider Range of Valuable Academic Work – LSE Impact,” LSE Impact – Understanding Impact and Practice in Academic Research, May 22, 2025, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2025/05/22/faculty-promotion-guidelines-should-account-for-a-wider-range-of-valuable-academic-work1/; Val Hollister, “The University of Maryland Department of Psychology Leads the Way in Aligning Open Science with Promotion & Tenure Guidelines,” SPARC, June 1, 2022, https://sparcopen.org/news/2022/the-university-of-maryland-department-of-psychology-leads-the-way-in-aligning-open-science-with-promotion-tenure-guidelines/; Karen Baehler et al., “Faculty Promotion Guidelines Should Account for a Wider Range of Valuable Academic Work – LSE Impact,” LSE Impact – Understanding Impact and Practice in Academic Research, May 22, 2025, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2025/05/22/faculty-promotion-guidelines-should-account-for-a-wider-range-of-valuable-academic-work1/.

3. Karen Hacker, “Translating Research into Practice: View from Community,” in Community-Based Participatory Research (SAGE Publications, Inc., 2013), https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452244181; OASPA, “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Real-World Importance of Open Access Today,” December 3, 2025, https://www.oaspa.org/events/beyond-the-ivory-tower-the-real-world-importance-of-open-access-today/.

4. Hicks et al., “Widespread Use of National Academies Consensus Reports by the American Public;” Ameet Doshi, “Public Use of Open Access Research: Evidence from the National Academies and Harvard DASH Repository,” August 9, 2023, https://hdl.handle.net/1853/72722.

5. Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do about It (MCD, 2025), https://catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/99131633576406421.

6. Michael Taylor, “The Hare and the Tortoise: Open Access Publications’ Immediate Impact and Lasting Advantage,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 77, no. 9 (2026), 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.70095.

7. Michael Taylor, “Evaluating Open Access Advantages for Citations and Altmetrics (2011–2021): A Dynamic and Evolving Relationship,” Quantitative Science Studies 7, no. 2026 (2026): 643–70, https://doi.org/10.1162/QSS.a.470; Katherine Stephan, “Does Open Access Result In More Policy Citations?” Social Science Space, November 16, 2022, https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2022/11/does-open-access-result-in-more-policy-citations/; Allison Langham-Putrow et al., “Is the Open Access Citation Advantage Real? A Systematic Review of the Citation of Open Access and Subscription-Based Articles,” PLOS ONE 16, no. 6 (2021): e0253129, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253129.

8. John Willinsky, “Policymakers’ Online Use of Academic Research,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 11 (2003): 2–2; Qianjin Zong et al., “Can Open Access Increase LIS Research’s Policy Impact? Using Regression Analysis and Causal Inference,” Scientometrics 128, no. 8 (2023): 4825–54, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04750-1; Teresa Schultz, “All the Research That’s Fit to Print: Open Access and the News Media,” Quantitative Science Studies 2, no. 3 (2021): 828–44, https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00139; Hans Jonker et al., “Societal Impact of University Research in the Written Press: Media Attention in the Context of SIUR and the Open Science Agenda among Social Scientists in Flanders, Belgium,” Scientometrics, ahead of print, April 27, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04374-x; Teresa Schultz, “A Survey of U.S. Science Journalists’ Knowledge and Opinions of Open Access Research,” International Journal of Communication 17, no. 0 (2023): 0.

9. Taylor, “Evaluating Open Access Advantages for Citations and Altmetrics.”

10. Rich G. Carter, “PTIE Findings: Expanding Promotion and Tenure Guidelines to Inclusively Recognize Innovation and Entrepreneurial Impact,” with Karl Mundorff et al., Oregon State University, September 18, 2020; Elizabeth Boquet et al., A Framework for Community Engaged Scholarship, 2012, https://www.wcsu.edu/community-engagement/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2018/05/Framework-Community-Engaged-Scholarship_Fairfield.pdf; Elyse L. Aurbach et al., “Modernizing Scholarship for the Public Good: An Action Framework for Public Research Universities,” uekpb_v1, preprint, OSF Preprints, November 7, 2023, https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/uekpb; Rachel Borchardt, “ACRL Impactful Scholarship and Metrics Task Force Background Results and Recommendations,” preprint, figshare, March 9, 2020, 25215 Bytes, 25215 Bytes, https://doi.org/10.6084/M9.FIGSHARE.11956512.

11. Ashley Gordon, “Intersection of Public Engagement and Open Access Presents Opportunities,” SPARC, July 22, 2025, https://sparcopen.org/news/2025/intersection-of-public-engagement-and-open-access-presents-opportunities/.