Monthly report – July 2025

Hello dear readers, and welcome to this month’s editorial report (and my final one)! In the spirit of the Singapore Biology Reporting Competition, I’ll be taking this special report to talk about the accessibility of scientific research. We’ll be looking at news recently reported in scientific and medical communication, data management, and publishing to understand the importance of research accessibility in the modern scientific ecosystem.

While many of the greatest scientific works in history are published freely for the world to peruse (think On the Origin of Species and The Selfish Gene), most works are not quite so easily accessible.

Rather than being able to simply take a trip to the bookstore, most scientific work done in the modern day takes place through publishing (incredible volumes of) papers in scientific journals. Nature, Cell, The Lancet… these are names that even laypeople have heard of, and they represent the best of all publishing within the biological and medical research worlds.

These journals have several issues. Rather frequently, one hears complaints about paywalls preventing most from being able to access research for free. But other issues arise when it comes to the use of these journals, among which the most pressing involve accessibility issues for those who have visual, cognitive and mobility impairments who are part of the scientific workforce. These barriers cause great difficulty in being able to read and understand texts, resulting in such individuals being blocked from accessing vital scientific literature.

Accessibility is also about understanding and communication. Many findings end up being misrepresented to the public or overlooked entirely, buried beneath poor conveyance of their meaning to the people who are impacted by it. By contrast, dumbing down research findings too much risks losing out on a great deal of vital detail and may introduce a whole host of biases. For scientific writers, figuring out how to balance these considerations is absolutely vital.

Lastly, we mustn’t forget the importance of data management. To ensure the private data of those participating in studies is safeguarded, new laws have been implemented.

Without further ado, how about we jump right into it?

Barriers after barriers

This year, Nature published an analysis from a sweep of a variety of data portals and online journals that evaluated how severe and widespread accessibility issues were amongst them.

To achieve this, the team first classified different forms of accessibility issues, such as those that blocked users from completing tasks, those that were due to poor design (low colour contrast), or those that involved missing labelling (e.g. no alt-text, which means that images cannot be easily read by screen readers). These failures were also classified as minor, moderate or severe.

After classification was complete, the team then used both computational and manual methods to analyse the various websites. The failure rate was calculated simply by dividing the number of failure points by the number of potential failure points across the site, where 0 would be the failure rate of a completely accessible website and 1 would be the failure rate of a site where all potential failure points contain inaccessible features.

The analysis showed that more than two-thirds of all websites analysed across both data portals and journal websites contained severe accessibility issues, among which missing image issues (almost half of data portals and more than 40% of journal sites) and poorly structured website landmarks (almost 80% of both types) figured as the most common and problematic.

Across different source types, it was noted that data portals were the most severely skewed towards high failure rates, while Asian sites (that were often presented differently due to not being in English) tended to have inaccessible features. The best-maintained scientific sites were those from the US government and European publications, mostly due to strict requirements or legislation that enforces accessibility for disabled readers as a necessity.

Nonetheless, the overall performance of most life science sites remained poor, suggesting that we still have a long way to go before our scientific publishing system becomes disability-conscious and allows the handicapped members of our society to just as easily access important work as abled individuals.

Do you think you’re smarter than a scientist?

Youtube channels, Medium blogs and an army of concerned mothers on Facebook often throw scientific studies around, explaining them through short infographic posts and videos with computer-generated voices. While it’s not uncommon that these posters can help spread awareness of important research findings through these methods, there is an inherent danger to the vaunted “video explainer”.

There is a concept in scientific practice known as the “easiness bias”. While it was famously said by Einstein that the true essence of genius is being able to explain any scientific concept at the level where your grandmother or a 5 year old child would be able to understand it (or something along those lines), it is undeniably the case that by simplifying scientific research, we leave out important parts of it.

Due to easiness bias, people tend to assume that scientific work that is presented in a digestible way is also much more credible, both because the work is easier to process and evokes more positive responses and also due to underestimating the complexity of the work. This bias results in those who consume such content becoming more prone to overestimating their understanding and making poor decisions due to misunderstanding results and failing to cross-evaluate with other sources.

To study this, Salzmann et al (2025) presented participants with either plain language summaries (dumbed-down versions of research abstracts) of research or animated video abstracts (taking the abstract and animating it.) Along with this, participants were either shown or not shown debiasing videos, which are clips that explain various forms of cognitive biases and allow participants to come to understand how they may play out in various realistic scenarios.

Shockingly, the debiasing videos proved to have no significant effect in this study. While the animated abstracts did not seem to significantly increase either the comprehension of the subject or the bias when it came to assessing one’s understanding, the plain language summaries ended up causing a much more noticeable increase in both metrics that was not then affected by having watched the debiasing videos.

Think about it. In your daily life, how often do you come across short sound-bites or reels that give you a simple scientific explanation to a seemingly complex topic, leaving you feeling like a subject matter expert? The next time you see one of these, think twice, and remember you could be falling into the easiness trap!

Safer data

Of course, we cannot discuss accessible research without considering the other side of the story – how research participants’ data is protected, and their ability to freely access it for transparency.

The UK has recently introduced a package of targeted amendments to the data regulations existing in the law, a long-awaited change that had been subjected to a prolonged period of parliamentary debate. This new regulation is a fair bit more permissive than the old regulations, especially regarding the life science sector. So what exactly is in this package?

This act defines scientific research as “any research that can reasonably be described as scientific, whether publicly or privately funded and whether carried out as a commercial or non-commercial activity”, though public health research will only be defined under this act as scientific if it is done for the interest of improving the welfare of the public, instead of other purposes e.g. for improving a private insurance business’ databases. The act then proceeds to set out the limits within which lawful data collection for research may be conducted.

Among some changes, the most significant seems to be the conditions under which data may be collected, the safeguards involved, and the transparency requirements for participants. Data may now be collected from subjects even when the purpose of the study to be conducted has not been fully fleshed out, though comprehensive measures must be taken to ensure their data is private (such as using pseudonyms in cases where patient identity is not relevant). Data also cannot be used to make individual medical decisions.

In addition, researchers are no longer required to proactively provide their data to the subjects where conditions are met, meaning that data is only given on request, and the regulatory burden on these data handlers is reduced.

Such laws are rarely thought about when one considers the life sciences. Indeed, even the lawmakers passing this act are placing more focus on the business data management practices of companies providing financial services. However, it is undeniable that ethical science, especially when the health and personal circumstances of patients in hospitals are involved, must take strong measures to ensure that their data is protected. Whether the new data regime in the UK will result in a more efficient and effective research ecosystem or add new risks to be mitigated in the future is yet to be seen.

Conclusion

I hope that this monthly report has been a nice change of pace from your grinding as perhaps the most hectic time of the year (for the actually hardworking students among us) comes crashing on down.

While learning as much as we can about the world around us is an intellectually stimulating and rewarding exercise, it is only by putting it into practice that we can make meaning of our learning. And in creating new knowledge, researching, we cannot afford to forget the barriers that hide knowledge away, the many traps and failings of communication, and the fact that science is not an excuse for harm.

Why not join the SBRC and take a shot at discussing a topic that matters deeply to you? Winners will have their articles published on the Straits Times, and all accepted articles will be in our newsletter, and the authors will be invited to join our team. Good luck, and have fun!

References:

1. L’Yi, S., Zhang, H. G., Mar, A. P., Smits, T. C., Weru, L., Rojas, S., Lex, A., & Gehlenborg, N. (2025, July 2). A comprehensive evaluation of life sciences data resources reveals significant accessibility barriers. Nature News. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-08731-7#Sec2

2. Salzmann, Sara, Charlotte Walther, and Kai Kaspar. “A New Dimension of Simplified Science Communication: The Easiness Effect of Science Popularization in Animated Video Abstracts.” Frontiers, July 7, 2025. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1584695/full

3. Paul Maynard, Fredericka Argent, and Tomos Griffiths , “The UK’s New Data Legislation – What Does It Mean for the Life Science Sector?,” Inside Privacy, June 26, 2025, https://www.insideprivacy.com/data-privacy/the-uks-new-data-legislation-what-does-it-mean-for-the-life-science-sector/.