Break down barriers by explaining jargon

It’s easy to think of science communication purely in terms of the whizz-bang excitement of events held for the public. But scientific progress depends upon communication between researchers – after all, you can’t build on someone else’s results if you never hear about them. Which is why it’s a shame that our current systems make reading about the latest results pretty difficult.

Even with open access initiatives to break through the barriers of journal paywalls, a further hurdle is thrown up by the language used to write research papers. As Aisha Al-Janabi explores, one issue is that this language is English. Writing up scientific results is hard – writing them up in a foreign language is far harder (and not helped by reviewers who then choose to criticise grammatical errors over scientific arguments).