The Open Access Paradox — How to Reach Those Who Cannot Be Reached

Information is available. But it is not reaching people.

The Open Access (OA) movement has sought to make scholarly knowledge freely available to everyone. From the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) of 2002 to Plan S in 2018, progress toward removing access barriers has been steady. In Japan, the expansion of J-STAGE for journal articles and e-Stat for government statistics has made an enormous volume of information technically available to anyone.

Yet information disparities have not narrowed. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' 2024 Communications Usage Trend Survey, the internet usage rate for households earning less than 2 million yen annually stands at 65.8%, compared to over 95% for households earning 4 million yen or more — a gap of approximately 30 percentage points. Moreover, this figure measures only whether access exists at all. The gap in whether people can actually read, comprehend, and apply information is far wider.

This note examines the structural fallacy in the assumption that "opening information makes it reach people," drawing on information sociology, the sociology of science, and public health. It then positions ISVD's three-section framework — "What Is Happening" → "Background and Context" → "Reading the Structure" — as one response to this disparity.

The Knowledge Gap Hypothesis: More Information Widens the Gap

"If we provide more information, everyone becomes better informed." The first to challenge this intuitive belief were Tichenor, Donohue & Olien (1970) with the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis.

Their argument was straightforward. As the supply of information through mass media increases, those with higher socioeconomic status acquire knowledge more rapidly. This is because the better-educated possess existing knowledge stocks, media literacy, and social networks that enable them to integrate new information into existing frames of reference more effectively. The result: increases in information supply do not close but rather widen the knowledge gap.

This hypothesis remains valid half a century later. The internet was supposed to close the gap by lowering access costs. What actually happened was the stratification of the digital divide into three layers — access, skills, and outcomes. Even as the first-layer access gap narrows, second- and third-layer gaps widen. The ability to search for, evaluate, and apply information to one's own situation has become the decisive factor in a "sea of information."

The Matthew Effect: To Those Who Have, More Shall Be Given

The mechanism by which knowledge gaps widen over time was formulated as a more general principle by Robert K. Merton (1968) with the Matthew Effect.

Named after Matthew 25:29 — "For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away" — the concept originally referred to cumulative advantage in the recognition of scientific achievement. Papers by already-famous scientists are cited more, while equivalent contributions by unknown researchers are overlooked. This imbalance accelerates over time.

In the context of knowledge access, the Matthew effect operates as follows. Those already possessing high information literacy are the first to exploit new information sources (OA journals, open data, AI tools), further increasing their literacy. Meanwhile, information-poor populations may not even know these sources exist, and the gap widens in a self-reinforcing cycle. Even if OA succeeds in "removing the wall," the difference between those who can walk through and those who cannot remains.

Information Poverty: Those Who Stay Inside the Walls

The existence of people who do not use information even when physical access is available was theorized by Elfreda A. Chatman (1996) in her Information Poverty theory.

Through small worlds theory, Chatman identified four characteristics of the information-poor. First, distrust of outside information sources. Public institutions and the media provide information that "is not for people like us." Second, self-protective secrecy. Individuals avoid revealing their ignorance or hardship to outsiders. Third, risk aversion. Accessing new information sources carries perceived psychological costs. Fourth, situational relevance. Information that does not directly relate to one's immediate lifeworld remains invisible, even when it exists.

The critical implication of this theory is that the cause of the information gap lies not only in "information being absent" but also in "information being present yet not reached for." OA addresses only the former; the latter remains untouched.

The Structural Limits of OA: Cost-Shifting and the Readability Wall

The OA movement itself harbors structural contradictions.

First, the problem of cost-shifting. In place of access fees charged to readers, the dominant model has shifted costs to authors through Article Processing Charges (APCs). Average APC amounts continue to rise, creating new barriers to entry for researchers and institutions with limited funding — particularly research bodies in the Global South and NPO-affiliated research units. In removing the wall of access, a wall of publication has risen in its place.

Second, and more fundamentally, there is the wall of readability. Lang et al. (2025) analyzed 1,241 Plain Language Summaries published by the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and found that only 2.8% (35 summaries) met "plain English" readability standards. Even texts that experts believed they had written accessibly failed to reach the average reading level of the general population.

This finding encapsulates the essential paradox of OA. Making a paper open means nothing if readers lack the health literacy to decode it. Against the three-level model of health literacy proposed by Don Nutbeam (2000) — functional literacy (the ability to read text), interactive literacy (social skills for eliciting information), and critical literacy (the ability to critically analyze and autonomously apply information) — OA addresses only the precondition for functional literacy (physical access) and cannot intervene in the disparities of interactive and critical literacy.

The Structure of the Paradox: Why "Opening" Alone Does Not Deliver

Synthesizing the discussion so far, the open access paradox can be formulated as follows:

The act of opening information preserves — and in some cases widens — disparities, so long as it presupposes differences in the capacity to use that information. The knowledge gap hypothesis showed that more information widens the gap. The Matthew effect showed that such gaps are self-reinforcing. Information poverty theory showed that even with physical access, psychological and social barriers impede information uptake. The OA movement succeeded in "removing the wall" but had no means to provide the power to walk through it — literacy, trust, and the bridging of context.

This structural limitation takes on a distinctive form in the Japanese context. The practice of "Easy Japanese" (yasashii nihongo), which originated in the wake of the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, demonstrated the principle that "information must be delivered in a form that reaches people, not merely in a form that is accurate." This principle has achieved some success in administrative documents and disaster information, but a methodology for communicating structural knowledge about social issues — why poverty arises, why inequality becomes entrenched — in "easy" terms has yet to be established.

The Intermediary Model: Delivering Through People

One response to the OA paradox is the intermediary model — delivering through people.

In the UK NHS's social prescribing program, professionals known as link workers translate medical information and community resource information into the patient's own context. Link workers are not information specialists, but they understand the patient's lifeworld and translate expert information into "what this means for your situation." They dismantle Chatman's four barriers — distrust, secrecy, risk aversion, and situational irrelevance — one by one, through human relationships.

The American Library Association (ALA) has similarly positioned librarians as community information intermediaries through its literacy programs. Libraries are an institution emblematic of open access to information, but much of their value is realized through librarians — people — who bridge the gap between users and information. The practice of community health workers (CHWs) has the same structure. They do not read medical journals, but they convey health knowledge in the language of local residents and support behavioral change.

What these intermediary models share is the function of "translating" information. Translation here is not mere paraphrase. It is the act of understanding the recipient's context — their life situation, existing knowledge, trust relationships, and psychological barriers — and reconstructing information into a form that is meaningful to them.

ISVD's Response: The Three-Section Framework as a "Translation Device"

ISVD's three-section article framework — "What Is Happening" → "Background and Context" → "Reading the Structure" — can be read as ISVD's own response to this paradox.

The first section, "What Is Happening," corresponds to Nutbeam's functional literacy. It presents statistical data and concrete facts, making explicit "what is currently occurring." It is an attempt to mitigate the "asymmetry of information volume" identified by the knowledge gap hypothesis through deliberate design of data selection and presentation.

The second section, "Background and Context," corresponds to interactive literacy. By presenting the structures behind the facts — historical trajectories, institutional backgrounds, theoretical frameworks — it provides scaffolding for readers to understand "why things are this way." Against Chatman's "situational irrelevance," it offers multiple contexts to which readers may connect their own.

The third section, "Reading the Structure," corresponds to critical literacy. It integrates data and context and offers an analytical lens for "how to read this structure." Rather than imposing conclusions, it provides a "lens" for reading structure. This design also functions as an intervention against the Matthew effect's self-reinforcing loop — by cultivating the capacity to read structure itself, it seeks to reduce the gap in subsequent information acquisition.

Naturally, the three-section framework alone does not resolve the paradox. Reading ISVD's articles requires a certain level of literacy, and the information-poor populations Chatman described are unlikely to reach this site in the first place. However, ISVD's role is not to "reach everyone directly" but to provide "resources for reading structure" to intermediaries — NPO practitioners, community support workers, librarians. Intermediaries understand structures through ISVD's articles and then "translate" them in their respective settings. Through this chain, information can indirectly reach those it would otherwise miss.

What the OA paradox teaches is that "opening" alone is insufficient. Information becomes knowledge only when it is translated, contextualized, and delivered through people. ISVD's three-section framework can function as one form of such a translation device. Whether it actually does so, however, remains a question for future research.

Mass Media Flow and Differential Growth in Knowledge — Tichenor, P. J., Donohue, G. A. & Olien, C. N.. Public Opinion Quarterly, 34(2), 159-170

The Matthew Effect in Science — Merton, R. K.. Science, 159(3810), 56-63

The Impoverished Life-World of Outsiders — Chatman, E. A.. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47(3), 193-206

Health literacy as a public health goal: a challenge for contemporary health education and communication strategies into the 21st century — Nutbeam, D.. Health Promotion International, 15(3), 259-267

Jargon and Readability in Plain Language Summaries of Health Research: Cross-Sectional Observational Study — Lang, I. A., King, A., Boddy, K., Stein, K., Asare, L., Day, J. & Liabo, K.. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 27, e50862

Budapest Open Access Initiative — Budapest Open Access Initiative. BOAI

Why Plan S? — cOAlition S. cOAlition S