The Language of Scientific Elitism

Why Scientific Journals Exclude You (and This Newsletter Doesn’t)

People detest the elitism of academia, and one of the largest drivers of that sense of separateness, of inaccessibility, and yes of elitism is the language. Time and again, I see impassioned, well-meaning commenters insist that scientific articles should be written for the regular person.

This strikes me as both naive and delusional.

Such people imagine science as a free public good, costless to maintain, and designed to serve anyone who wants access. To be fair, this is the ideal we teach in schools. But in reality, nothing is sustainable unless someone is willing to pay for it. Every lasting institution has a customer, and the system is built around that customer’s needs. In scientific publishing, the paying customers are governments, universities, and corporations. These are the ones footing the bill.

I once had a commenter tell me they were outraged that a climate scientist didn’t have the raw data from a paper 25 years earlier. But think about what it would mean to keep such a thing: equipment, cataloguing systems, redundant backups, staff to maintain it across decades, replacements for failed drives. Professional storage would be an ongoing expense, and who would maintain it after that scientist leaves, retires, or dies? Meanwhile, most labs are running on shoestring budgets, with many scientists moving every few years from one short-term contract to another. If the public really wanted permanent data archives, they would need to fund centralized institutions dedicated to it. But the public does not want to pay more for better, slower, more intentional science. Instead, there is a relentless drumbeat for faster results with less money.

The same logic applies to journals. A scientific journal is not a public education charity. It is a business, and its business model is selling information to scientists and institutions who need it. Under that regime, why would journals retool their entire product to serve a general audience that provides them no revenue? People imagine that making scientific articles more accessible to the public is just a matter of “writing more clearly,” but in practice it means longer papers, more background exposition, and redundancies that professionals in the same niche don’t need. That is more work for authors, more space in journals, more editorial cost. It means bloated papers that are slower for experts to parse and less efficient at communicating new results. And crucially, it doesn’t help scientists get grants, jobs, or promotions.

I see this tradeoff in my own work. I’m currently revising the papers from my dissertation. The drafts are accessible to a general audience and heavily expository: the same highly prized qualities many critics say journals should encourage. By default, I write to explain ideas fully and clearly, but for a professional audience that’s not what’s required. Experts find such papers hard to read because they can’t tell what is genuinely new and what is already familiar. They don’t necessarily want engaging prose. They want writing that follows the familiar patterns of other papers, even when those papers are poorly written, because consistency is easier to parse. Expository writing also produces longer papers, and my drafts run about twice the length they should. So part of my job in revision is stripping down the background and highlighting the novel contributions.

Before, when I said grants, jobs, and promotions, that was code for money, and money itself is code for time. Every hour spent rewriting a paper for the general public is an hour not spent on experiments, mentoring, or chasing the next grant that keeps the lab alive. It’s not that scientists oppose clarity or public access. It’s that they live in a system where every tradeoff is measured in scarce hours and even scarcer dollars. The supposedly “free” improvements people demand would in fact cost something very real.

That is why journals look the way they do. They are professional documents, more like architectural blueprints or doctors’ notes than popular magazines. They exist to let people in the field advance the work. And if the public truly wants a parallel system that translates all of this into accessible language, there is nothing stopping them from funding it. The barrier isn’t some secret conspiracy against transparency. It is the absence of anyone willing to pay for what they say they want.

Which brings us here. If you want a better system, this is what it looks like. You are reading it: a scientific newsletter that takes time to explain ideas clearly, connect them to the larger picture, and make them accessible without losing rigor. The gentleman scientists had family money. The Renaissance geniuses had patrons. I have you.

The model is simple. If you want something statistical explained, you become a paying customer, ask me, and I explain it. Your support makes this possible, free from the tyranny of university bureaucracies.

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