As stated in the “UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science", Open Science has the potential of making the scientific processes more transparent, inclusive, and democratic. It is undisputed that research funded by the public should be made publicly accessible. In addition to the accessibility of research results through Open Access publishing, their comprehensibility is an essential element on the path towards Open Science. This aspect has not yet received much attention in the current debate on the promotion of Open Science and Open Access publishing.

With the overall vision to increase the awareness for and the availability of Open Access lay abstracts in Switzerland, we propose herein a largely conceptual project with the three following objectives: 

1. Prototypical evaluation of a lay abstract procedure for high-quality open access articles from four independent, non-profit Swiss journals (a) Swiss Medical Weekly, (b) International Journal of Public Health, (c) Public Health Reviews and (d) MedienPädagogik. 

2. The concept of strategic communication for the Lay Publica of the four journals in the multilingual Swiss context will be developed based on research.

3. The results of the prototypical evaluation and the communication concept will be negotiated with the scientific communities.

The outlined project should act as a conceptional communication project targeted towards the promotion of Open Science via lay abstract in Switzerland. Evaluation of good-practice and available digital tools will be integral part of this communication project in an international context.

Five complementary work packages will be established: WP1 (project lead ZHAW) includes the overall project coordination. WP2 (PH Zürich) consists 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. In WP3 (SMW), a prototype procedure will be evaluated to be able to publish lay abstracts of suitable articles. In WP4, ZHAW, using its tools to research and develop strategic communication, will develop a communication concept to directly address the lay audiences identified for the four journals to promote open access abstracts for lay audiences. Not only the planning of strategic communication with the lay audience is important, but also the communication backwards within the scientific communities: The results of the previous WPs will be negotiated with the respective scientific communities (WP5; SSPH+ in close cooperation with ZHAW).