Making Scholarly Research Accessible for Independent Researchers in 2025
Jun 23, 2025 |
21 Mins Read
Many researchers work outside of universities or formal institutions. These independent researchers often rely on public access to scholarly research to study, write, or contribute to their fields.
However, access to scholarly research is not equal. Most academic journals are behind paywalls, which means users must pay to read them unless they are affiliated with an institution that pays for access.
In this blog, we’ll explore the structure of academic publishing and how it affects independent researchers. We’ll break down the current challenges, the systems in place, and recent developments designed to improve research accessibility.
Why Research Accessibility Matters
Research accessibility refers to how easily someone can read, use, and build upon academic studies. For independent researchers, access is often limited because they lack university or library credentials required to unlock paywalled content.
A large portion of scholarly research remains behind subscription paywalls. Many journal articles cost between $30 and $50 each, and full journal subscriptions can reach thousands of dollars per year.
These costs create a divide between researchers affiliated with institutions and those working independently. Independent researchers may be excluded from current findings, which restricts their ability to contribute to academic conversations.
Without equal access, knowledge development becomes uneven. Some communities and individuals are left out, creating a gap in who can participate in scientific and scholarly work.
Understanding Open Access Models
Open access (OA) refers to academic research that anyone can read online without paying. There are different types of open access, and each works in a specific way.
1. Gold Open Access to Scholarly Research
Gold open access means that the final version of a research article is freely available on the publisher's website. The author or their funder usually pays a fee to make the article open.
Researchers can find gold open access content in fully open access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). These journals allow anyone to read and download the scholarly research directly from the publisher.
- Reader benefit: Immediate access to the final, formatted version of articles
- Limitation: Authors often pay fees ranging from $500-$3000 to publish
2. Green Open Access
Green open access is when authors share a version of their article in a free online repository. This version may be a preprint (before peer review) or a postprint (after peer review but before journal formatting).
Repositories like arXiv.org specialise in many disciplines, and bioRxiv.org for biology, host these papers. These platforms do not require any affiliation to access the content.
- Reader benefit: Free access to research content, often before formal publication
- Limitation: The version available might not be the final published version
3. Diamond Open Access
Diamond open access journals make articles freely available to read and do not charge authors any fees to publish. Neither readers nor authors pay. One good example of diamond open access is KnE Publishing, an open access publishing service by Knowledge E, provides high-quality publishing services to support the development and advancement of diamond open access journals, with a particular focus on increasing the visibility and accessibility of scholarly research.
This model is often supported by academic institutions or non-profit organisations. The Free Journal Network lists many of these journals.
- Reader benefit: Completely free access with no barriers
- Author benefit: No publication fees to share research
| Open Access Model | Who Pays | Where to Find | Version Available |
| Gold | Authors/funders | Publisher websites | Final published version |
| Green | No one (usually) | Repositories | Preprint or postprint |
| Diamond | Institutions/grants | Publisher websites | Final published version |
Practical Tools For Independent Researchers
Independent researchers need affordable ways to find and use scholarly research. Several tools make this process easier.
AI Summarisers
AI summarisers extract the main points from academic papers. These AI tools help researchers quickly understand if a paper is relevant to their work without reading the entire document.
Zendy's AI summarisation tool identifies key findings, methods, and conclusions from scholarly research papers. This saves time when reviewing large amounts of literature.
- Time-saving: Condenses hours of reading into minutes
- Comprehension aid: Helps readers understand complex academic language
Literature Discovery Tools
Discovery tools help researchers find academic papers and locate free versions when available.
Google Scholar indexes scholarly research and sometimes links to free versions.
Zendy uses AI to recommend relevant papers based on your interests.
Browser extensions like Unpaywall and Open Access Button automatically find legal, free versions of paywalled articles.
- Broader search: Searches across multiple journals and repositories at once
- Free alternatives: Identifies open access versions of paywalled content
Scholarly Research Reference Manager Tools
Reference manager tools help organise research papers and create citations. These tools are essential for independent researchers writing their own papers.
Zotero is a free, open-source reference manager that saves papers, creates citations, and integrates with word processors. Mendeley offers similar features with some social networking elements.
- Organisation: Keeps research papers in one searchable library
- Citation help: Automatically formats citations in different styles
Policy Shifts Empowering Independent Scholars
Recent policy changes are increasing the amount of research that is freely available to everyone. These changes help independent researchers access more content without institutional subscriptions.
Plan S requires that research funded by certain organisations be published with open access. This means more high-quality scholarly research is becoming freely available to read.
Many funding agencies now require researchers to share their findings openly. The National Institutes of Health in the US and UK Research and Innovation have policies requiring funded research to be publicly accessible.
Authors are also finding ways to keep their rights to share their work. Rights retention strategies allow researchers to post copies of their articles in public repositories even when publishing in traditional journals.
The trend toward open science continues to grow. More institutions are adopting policies that make research outputs—including data, software, and educational materials—freely available by default.
Ensuring Accessibility For All Researchers
Accessibility in scholarly research goes beyond open access. It also means making content usable for people with disabilities and those using different devices or internet connections.
Universal Design Principles
Universal design makes scholarly research usable by as many people as possible. This includes clear structure, readable text, and compatibility with assistive tools.
Well-designed articles use proper headings, include descriptions for images, and create documents that work with screen readers. These features help all users navigate and understand the content more easily.
Examples of accessible design in scholarly research:
- Structured headings that create a logical outline
- Alternative text for images and diagrams
- Tables with proper headers and simple layouts
- PDF files with proper tagging for screen readers
Assistive Technology Compatibility
Assistive technologies help people with disabilities access digital content. Researchers need to work well with these tools.
Screen readers convert text to speech for people who are blind or have low vision. Text enlargement tools and colour contrast adjusters help people with different visual needs.
When looking for accessible research content:
- PDF accessibility: Look for tagged PDFs that work with screen readers
- HTML versions: Often more accessible than PDFs for assistive technologies
- Plain text options: Simple format that works with most assistive tools
If you need a more accessible version of any scholarly research, you can contact the publisher directly. Many journals now provide alternative formats upon request.
New Innovations in Research Access
The landscape of scholarly access continues to evolve with new models and technologies making research more available to independent scholars.
AI-powered research assistants are changing how people interact with academic literature. These tools can summarise articles, extract key information, and help researchers find connections between papers.
Digital libraries like Zendy are creating alternatives to traditional subscription models. With AI assistants like ZAIA (Zendy's AI assistant for researchers), these platforms not only partner with publishers to offer access to both open and paywalled content at affordable rates for individual researchers, but also enhance the research experience through AI support.
The future of scholarly research access looks increasingly open and innovative. New technologies and business models continue to break down barriers between knowledge and those who seek it.
FAQs about Accessing Scholarly Research
How can independent researchers find free academic articles legally?
Independent researchers can use open access repositories like PubMed Central and preprint servers like arXiv. Public libraries sometimes offer access to academic databases, and contacting authors directly often results in them sharing their papers.
What makes scholarly research accessible to people with disabilities?
Accessible scholarly research uses proper document structure with headings, provides alternative text for images, creates tables that screen readers can navigate, and offers formats compatible with assistive technologies. Articles in HTML format are typically more accessible than PDFs, and properly tagged PDFs are more accessible than untagged ones.
How do researchers evaluate the quality of open access journals?
Researchers can check if an open access journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), look for clear peer review policies, verify the journal's impact factor, and research the editorial board members. Quality open access journals maintain the same rigorous standards as traditional subscription journals.
What AI tool helps independent researchers conduct a literature review?
ZAIA, Zendy's AI research assistant, helps independent researchers conduct efficient literature reviews by automatically summarising academic papers, extracting key findings, and identifying connections between related studies. Researchers can also use reference managers like Zotero or Mendeley to organise papers and create citations. Literature mapping tools like VOSviewer help visualise research networks and identify influential papers. For comprehensive literature reviews, ZAIA can recommend relevant papers based on your research interests, saving hours of manual searching across multiple databases.
Research Integrity, Partnership, and Societal Impact
Research integrity extends beyond publication to include how scholarship is discovered, accessed, and used, and its societal impact depends on more than editorial practice alone. In practice, integrity and impact are shaped by a web of platforms and partnerships that determine how research actually travels beyond the press. University press scholarship is generally produced with a clear public purpose, speaking to issues such as education, public health, social policy, culture, and environmental change, and often with the explicit aim of informing practice, policy, and public debate. Whether that aim is realised increasingly depends on what happens to research once it leaves the publishing workflow. Discovery platforms, aggregators, library consortia, and technology providers all influence this journey. Choices about metadata, licensing terms, ranking criteria, or the use of AI-driven summarisation affect which research is surfaced, how it is presented, and who encounters it in the first place. These choices can look technical or commercial on the surface, but they have real intellectual and social consequences. They shape how scholarship is understood and whether it can be trusted beyond core academic audiences. For university presses, this changes where responsibility sits. Editorial quality remains critical, but it is no longer the only consideration. Presses also have a stake in how their content is discovered, contextualised, and applied in wider knowledge ecosystems. Long-form and specialist research is particularly exposed here. When material is compressed or broken apart for speed and scale, nuance can easily be lost, even when the intentions behind the system are positive. This is where partnerships start to matter in a very practical way. The conditions under which presses work with discovery services directly affect whether their scholarship remains identifiable, properly attributed, and anchored in its original context. For readers using research in teaching, healthcare, policy, or development settings, these signals are not decorative. They are essential to responsible use. Zendy offers one example of how these partnerships can function differently. As a discovery and access platform serving researchers, clinicians, and policymakers in emerging and underserved markets, Zendy is built around extending reach without undermining trust. University press content is surfaced with clear attribution, structured metadata, and rights-respecting access models that preserve the integrity of the scholarly record. Zendy works directly with publishers to agree how content is indexed, discovered, and, where appropriate, summarised. This gives presses visibility into and control over how their work appears in AI-supported discovery environments, while helping readers approach research with a clearer sense of scope, limitations, and authority. From a societal impact perspective, this matters. Zendy’s strongest usage is concentrated in regions where access to trusted scholarship has long been uneven, including parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In these contexts, university press research is not being read simply for academic interest. It is used in classrooms, clinical settings, policy development, and capacity-building efforts, areas closely connected to the Sustainable Development Goals. Governance really sits at the heart of this kind of model. Clear and shared expectations around metadata quality, content provenance, licensing boundaries, and the use of AI are what make the difference between systems that encourage genuine engagement and those that simply amplify visibility without depth. Metadata is not just a technical layer: it gives readers the cues they need to understand what they are reading, where it comes from, and how it should be interpreted. AI-driven discovery and new access models create real opportunities to broaden the reach of university press publishing and to connect trusted scholarship with communities that would otherwise struggle to access it. But reach on its own does not equate to impact. When context and attribution are lost, the value of the research is diminished. Societal impact depends on whether work is understood and used with care, not simply on how widely it circulates. For presses with a public-interest mission, active participation in partnerships like these is a way to carry their values into a more complex and fast-moving environment. As scholarship is increasingly routed through global, AI-powered discovery systems, questions of integrity, access, and societal relevance converge. Making progress on shared global challenges requires collaboration, shared responsibility, and deliberate choices about the infrastructures that connect research to the wider world. For university presses, this is not a departure from their mission, but a continuation of it, with partnerships playing an essential role. FAQ How do platforms and partnerships affect research integrity?Discovery platforms, aggregators, and technology partners influence which research is surfaced, how it’s presented, and who can access it. Choices around metadata, licensing, and AI summarization directly impact understanding and trust. Why are university press partnerships important?Partnerships allow presses to maintain attribution, context, and control over their content in discovery systems, ensuring that research remains trustworthy and properly interpreted. How does Zendy support presses and researchers?Zendy works with publishers to surface research with clear attribution, structured metadata, and rights-respecting access, preserving integrity while extending reach to underserved regions. For partnership inquiries, please contact: Sara Crowley Vigneau Partnership Relations Manager Email: s.crowleyvigneau@zendy.io .wp-block-image img { max-width: 65% !important; margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; }
Beyond Publication. Access as a Research Integrity Issue
If research integrity now extends beyond publication to include how scholarship is discovered and used, then access is not a secondary concern. It is foundational. In practice, this broader understanding of integrity quickly runs into a hard constraint: access. A significant percentage of academic publishing is still behind paywalls, and traditional library sales models fail to serve institutions with limited budgetsor uneven digital infrastructure. Even where university libraries exist, access is often delayed or restricted to narrow segments of the scholarly record. The consequences are structural rather than incidental. When researchers and practitioners cannot access the peer-reviewed scholarship they need, it drops out of local research agendas, teaching materials as well as policy conversations. Decisions are then shaped by whatever information is most easily available, not necessarily by what is most rigorous or relevant. Over time, this weakens citation pathways, limits regional participation in scholarly debate, and reinforces global inequity in how knowledge is visible, trusted, and amplified. The ongoing success of shadow libraries highlights this misalignment: Sci-Hub reportedly served over 14 million monthly users in 2025, indicating sustained and widespread demand for academic research that existing access models continue to leave unmet. This is less about individual behaviour than about a system that consistently fails to deliver essential knowledge where it is needed most. The picture looks different when access barriers are reduced: usage data from open and reduced-barrier initiatives consistently show strong engagement across Asia and Africa, particularly in fields linked to health, education, social policy, and development. These patterns highlight how emerging economies rely on high-quality publishing in contexts where it directly impacts professional practice and public decision-making. From a research integrity perspective, this is important. When authoritative sources are inaccessible, alternative materials step in to fill the gap. The risk is not only exclusion, but distortion. Inconsistent, outdated, or unverified sources become more influential precisely because they are easier to obtain. Misinformation takes hold most easily where trusted knowledge is hardest to reach. Addressing access is about more than widening readership or improving visibility, it is about ensuring that high-quality scholarship can continue to shape understanding and decisions in the contexts it seeks to serve. For university presses committed to the public good, this challenge sits across discovery systems, licensing structures, technology platforms, and the partnerships that increasingly determine how research is distributed, interpreted, and reused. If research integrity now extends across the full lifecycle of scholarship, then sustaining it requires collective responsibility and shared frameworks. How presses engage with partners, infrastructures, and governance mechanisms becomes central to protecting both trust and impact. FAQ: What challenges exist in current access models?Many academic works remain behind paywalls, libraries face budget and infrastructure constraints, and access delays or restrictions can prevent researchers from using peer-reviewed scholarship effectively. What happens when research is inaccessible?When trusted sources are hard to reach, alternative, inconsistent, or outdated materials often fill the gap, increasing the risk of misinformation and weakening citation pathways. How does Zendy help address access challenges?Zendy provides affordable and streamlined access to high-quality research, helping scholars, practitioners, and institutions discover and use knowledge without traditional barriers. For partnership inquiries, please contact:Sara Crowley VigneauPartnership Relations ManagerEmail:s.crowleyvigneau@zendy.io .wp-block-image img { max-width: 65% !important; margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; }
Beyond Peer Review. Research Integrity in University Press Publishing
University presses play a distinctive role in advancing research integrity and societal impact. Their publishing programmes are closely aligned with public-interest research in the humanities, social sciences, global health, education, and environmental studies, disciplines that directly inform policy and progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This work typically prioritises depth, context, and long-term understanding, often drawing on regional expertise and interdisciplinary approaches rather than metrics-driven outputs. Research integrity is traditionally discussed in terms of editorial rigour, peer review, and ethical standards in the production of scholarship. These remain essential. But in an era shaped by digital platforms and AI-led discovery, they are no longer sufficient on their own. Integrity now also depends on what happens after publication: how research is surfaced, interpreted, reduced, and reused. For university presses, this shift is particularly significant. Long-form scholarship, a core strength of press programmes, is increasingly encountered through abstracts, summaries, extracts, and automated recommendations rather than sustained reading. As AI tools mediate more first encounters with research, meaning can be subtly altered through selection, compression, or loss of context. These processes are rarely neutral. They encode assumptions about relevance, authority, and value. This raises new integrity questions. Who decides which parts of a work are highlighted or omitted? How are disciplinary nuance and authorial intent preserved when scholarship is summarised? What signals remain to help readers understand scope, limitations, or evidentiary weight? This isn’t to say that AI-driven discovery is inherently harmful, but it does require careful oversight. If university press scholarship is to continue informing research, policy, and public debate in meaningful ways, it needs to remain identifiable, properly attributed, and grounded in its original framing as it moves through increasingly automated discovery systems. In this context, research integrity extends beyond how scholarship is produced to include how it is processed, surfaced and understood. For presses with a public-interest mission, research integrity now extends across the full journey of a work, from how it is published to how it is discovered, interpreted and used. FAQ Can Zendy help with AI-mediated research discovery?Yes. Zendy’s tools help surface, summarise, and interpret research accurately, preserving context and authorial intent even when AI recommendations are used. Does AI discovery harm research, or can it be beneficial?AI discovery isn’t inherently harmful—it can increase visibility and accessibility. However, responsible use is essential to prevent misinterpretation or loss of nuance, ensuring research continues to inform policy and public debate accurately. How does Zendy make research more accessible?Researchers can explore work from multiple disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, global health, and environmental studies, all in one platform with easy search and AI-powered insights. For partnership inquiries, please contact:Sara Crowley Vigneau Partnership Relations Manager Email: s.crowleyvigneau@zendy.io .wp-block-image img { max-width: 65% !important; margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; }
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