According to the "UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science" (UNESCO 2021), Open Science has the potential to make scientific processes more transparent, inclusive, and democratic. The notion that publicly funded research should be publicly accessible is undisputed. In addition to the accessibility of research findings through open-access publications, their comprehensibility for a broad public audience is a crucial element in advancing Open Science. Articles in scientific journals address complex topics and are typically written in specialised language. Their dissemination channels follow the logic of academic research and often only reach individuals within the same academic community.

Lay abstracts (lay summaries) aim to improve the accessibility of scientific research processes and their comprehensibility for a broader, non-specialist audience. This form of science communication, which targets a non-specialist readership, is characterised by simple language, the avoidance of technical jargon, and a clear structure (Sedgwick et al. 2021; Hahn 2022; c.f. Stoll et al. 2022; Falkenberg, Joyce, and Soranno 2024).

In the medical field, EU regulation (European Parliament and European Council 2014) mandates lay abstracts for scholarly articles, leading to a body of experience that is now being extended through the potential of automated generation with the help of Artificial Intelligency (AI).

As part of this project “SciComOA – Science Communication for a Lay Audience”, prototype methods are being developed for creating lay abstracts of selected articles from four independent, non-profit Swiss journals: 1) International Journal of Public Health (ISSN 1661-8564), 2) Public Health Reviews (ISSN 2107-6952), 3) Swiss Medical Weekly (ISSN 1424-3997), and 4) MedienPädagogik (ISSN 1424-3636).

For lay abstracts to establish themselves as an integral part of the publication process, it is important that the respective editorial offices of the journals are on board. This is the case in this project. The attitude and judgements of the authors towards lay abstracts are also of central importance. Only if these are collected and integrated a basis for this endeavour to succeed can be created. The definition of lay authorship by the authors of the respective journal and the collection of the conditions under which authors could even imagine supporting such lay abstracts are at the centre of this research project. This approach not only supports the results obtained from the theoretical preliminary work, but also promotes acceptance on the part of the authors in the sense of a participatory research process. Based on these findings, further research in collaboration with the lay target groups can be used to examine possible communication scenarios and ultimately consolidate them by integrating them into a communication strategy that is also valid for other journals.

Access to information is key to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There is an obvious link between Open Access and availability of information, and therefore between Open Access, and the SDGs. But science needs to become more discoverable, approachable, and understandable for persons who are not experts in the relevant field throughout Europe. Because this project involves a range of stakeholders and targets the lay public per se, the findings can benefit the European Higher Education Area, their people, as well as society at large.

One of the first steps in the project was the conduction of a comprehensive literature and project review to get insight into discourses of lay abstracts in different scientific fields and good practices for identifying and producing lay abstracts from peer-reviewed articles. The editorial working group will have developed best practices, especially regarding editorial/technical workflows and solutions, for composing and publishing lay abstracts for peer-reviewed research articles, especially at the example of a medial not-for-profit Diamond Open Access journal. An important milestone for development of a communication strategy to make the lay abstracts accessible and to sensitise the public, is to identify possible lay target groups for the four journals and to assess accessibility to these target groups through media usage habits. In order to achieve this, authors from these journals were surveyed online regarding their views on lay summaries in November and December 2024 (Taddicken 2013). In the course of this explorative research, and in preparation for the follow up structured interviews with authors, samples of lay abstracts were produced from their latest articles with the help of AI, and were used as explorative stimuli during the interviews. The materials from the 12 interviews conducted with authors to date were transcribed and subsequently analysed (Kuckartz and Rädiker 2022). Developing a communication strategy to make lay abstracts visible to lay audiences, including the involvement of respective research communities to promote the developed concept of producing lay abstracts will be the essential part of the final step in this one year project.

The findings provide insights into how scientific content from Open Access journals can be prepared so that they become accessible and comprehensible – again – as Open Access content for a broader, interested public. The pilot of the lay abstracts and concepts developed by the project team will be applicable to all involved disciplines and editorial offices (health sciences, medicine, media education). In addition, as part of our increased networking, we will exchange ideas with representatives of the lay audience and editors of other journals from various disciplines. For the presentation at #ECER2025 audiences can expect firstly, central results from the literature review which indicates that no one-size-fits-all solution exists for the creation of lay abstracts as for each journal and scientific communities individual practices need to be considered. Besides linguistic aspects of readability, questions arise of modes of representation like visualisations, questions arise about findability, and matters arise of trustworthiness of lay abstracts after they have been rewritten from their professional original. Secondly, the process of developing communication strategies including the surveys with authors reveal – among other aspects, that authors consider different person groups as ‘lays’. While original abstracts usually were written for academic peers, authors from the respective communities would still consider a graduated range or graded bandwidth between academic professionals to their lay public, including specific professionals in between, like health professionals or teachers. Thirdly, insights highlight that not only a deeper analysis of scientific versus lay communication strategies but also a critical reflection on the underlying assumptions about knowledge transfer, and the accessibility of specialised content need further consideration.

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