how to make research more accessible

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April 27, 2022

You’ve done the hard work, now here’s how to make sure it’s seen, used, and cited as you promote your research. Find our six suggestions for making your research more accessible below.

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Making research accessible: Six top tips for accessible communication

Research Retold

In this blog, Josephine Haagen shares her top six tips for making research accessible.

Josephine is a recent Liberal Arts graduate from the University of Leeds, and she is passionate about research communication and working with data.

Research and accessible communication

In 1995, the Disability Discrimination Act was passed in parliament, paving the way for a number of protections for disabled people in their everyday lives. Today, 25 years later, it’s worth taking stock of the ways we can make our work more accessible to the 14 million disabled people in the UK, who make up 20% of the country’s working-age adults.

With today’s reliance on technology to receive information and disseminate research, we can adapt aspects of our work to ensure it can be accessed by people with disabilities. The world of accessible communication is constantly changing and improving and it’s our responsibility to stay abreast of the changes if we want our work to be inclusive.

The aim of this blog post is to provide 6 top tips to help you disseminate research in a more accessible way. The tips are adapted from the UK government advice on accessible communication.

Making research accessible: Text

1. keep text clear, concise and formatted simply.

Making research accessible can often be just a matter of font and formatting. For example, keep a large-text copy of your work on hand, in case someone asks for it. Large text (above size 16 font) helps people who are visually impaired or have learning disabilities.

Similarly, densely formatted text can be hard to read, so choose either a widely spaced font (Calibri, Helvetica, Arial) or manually edit the spacing of your text. For example, double-spaced paragraphs are easiest to read, as they lessen the level of visual stress  on the page.

• For emphasis use  bold  text
• Underlining can be mistaken for hyperlinks
• Italics can be difficult to read

2. Include a simplified summary

It can be helpful to attach a summary of your research that is concise, avoids jargon, and has less visual stress ( Research Retold can help with this! ).

Some word processors, like Microsoft Word, have an in-program accessibility checker that can create suggestions based on your work. In addition, design programmes have the option to create ‘screen-reader’ friendly documents so be sure to check what options you have.

Making research accessible: Visuals

3. add alternative text to images.

A significant step to making visuals accessible is to attach alternative text (alt text) that describes its contents.

Alt text helps people who can’t see the screen understand what’s important about the image you’re including – good alt text is succinct and accurate; it presents all the relevant information that would be gathered from someone seeing the image for themselves.

Many platforms have alt text built into them. For example, when you upload an image on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram there’s a button that allows you to add alt text. Let’s see some examples.

Adding alt text on Twitter

When you add a photo on Twitter, you have a button underneath the photo that says ‘Add description’. If you click that you see the below. In the description box at the bottom, you can add 1000-characters to describe your image.

Adding alt text on LinkedIn

When you upload a photo on LinkedIn, you have a blue button that says ‘Add alt text’ in the top right corner. Click it and you get this – you have 120 characters to describe your image.

Adding alt text on Facebook

When you upload a photo on Facebook, you have a blue button that says ‘Edit’ in the top left corner. Click it and you get this panel open on the left – you can add custom text or Facebook is helpful and populates the text box for you.

Adding alt text in Word

Right-clicking on an image in Microsoft Word brings up an option that says ‘edit alt text’.

How to write good alt text?

WebAIM has a good guide on writing the best alt text, as well as how to write it into HTML on self-published websites. This applies to graphs and charts too. Write a brief statement that describes what your audience is looking at.

4. Consider colour contrasts

As a general rule for the best contrast, place dark types and images against a light background. In-program accessibility checkers can help discern whether the level of contrast makes your text and visuals easy to see.

Moreover, avoid using colour on its own to convey information. Use patterns or labelling to ensure that your audience can understand your thinking without having to differentiate between the colours presented to them.

Making research more accessible: Video and audio

5. include subtitles on videos.

Subtitling videos is the best way to make them accessible to hearing-impaired viewers. It’s a worthwhile effort whenever you create videos, as many people watch videos without sound by only reading the subtitles. To help with this, YouTube has created a guide to syncing closed captions to the videos you upload on their platform.

Additionally, visually impaired viewers may need a separate audio-description track that describes what is going on on-screen. This is especially the case if your video relies heavily on charts or images.

6. Provide a transcript

A good way to maximise the level of accessibility of audio or video content is to create a transcript. Basic transcripts contain the full script of the video written out. A descriptive transcript also includes text descriptions of the visual information required to understand the content. Viewers can refer back to it if they missed something, or to see if they’re interested.

In conclusion, making research accessible to the wider public involves small but significant steps.

This is worth doing as people become more interested in research and as researchers aim to disseminate their research to achieve impact.

The tips in this blog post are a small fraction of the ways you can adapt your research.

For more comprehensive resources and guides, visit the Web Accessibility Initiative  and the UKAAF (UK Association for Accessible Formats) .

Many thanks to Josephine for sharing these six top tips for making research more accessible. What other tips would you add to the list?

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• v.106(12); Dec 2016

Conducting Accessible Research: Including People With Disabilities in Public Health, Epidemiological, and Outcomes Studies

D. Rios led the development of the article, was responsible for writing and conceptualizing significant portions, and integrated contributions from other authors. S. Magasi participated in conceptualizing the article, provided extensive consultation to D. Rios, and took a lead role in writing the section on “Practical Study Issues.” C. Novak participated in the conceptualization of the article, provided examples from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and reviewed and provided feedback on the final draft. M. Harniss initiated the article as part of an ongoing project, participated in conceptualizing the article, worked closely with D. Rios in structuring the article, participated in writing the sections on “Accessible Research Design,” and provided editorial feedback throughout.

People with disabilities are largely absent from mainstream health research. Exclusion of people with disabilities may be explicit, attributable to poorly justified exclusion criteria, or implicit, attributable to inaccessible study documents, interventions, or research measures. Meanwhile, people with disabilities experience poorer health, greater incidence of chronic conditions, and higher health care expenditure than people without disabilities. We outline our approach to “accessible research design”—research accessible to and inclusive of people with disabilities. We describe a model that includes 3 tiers: universal design, accommodations, and modifications. Through our work on several large-scale research studies, we provide pragmatic examples of accessible research design. Making efforts to include people with disabilities in public health, epidemiological, and outcomes studies will enhance the interpretability of findings for a significant patient population.

In recent years, the inclusion of traditionally underrepresented groups in research has received increasing attention, including racial and ethnic minorities, women, elderly individuals, and children. 1,2 This focus has grown as the scientific community has raised concerns over the appropriateness of translating research conducted with narrow groups of participants to the general population. The inclusion of women and minority populations in research has been mandated by the National Institutes of Health, 3 and has been the subject of several large-scale initiatives, such as EMPaCT (Enhancing Minority Participation in Clinical Trials) and Project IMPACT (Increase Minority Participation and Awareness of Clinical Trials). 2,4

Despite these trends toward increased inclusion of minority groups in research, people with disabilities (PWD) continue to be excluded from health research. 5,6 At the same time, PWD are one of the greatest potential beneficiaries of health care services. It is estimated that health care for adults with disabilities amounts to roughly $400 billion per year, and represents approximately one quarter of health care expenditures in the United States. 7 Estimates of health care expenditures are even higher among adult Medicare and Medicaid recipients, 7 and children with disabilities incur 4 times the health care expenses of their nondisabled peers. 8 Not providing equal representation for PWD in health research seriously limits the application of research findings for a significant patient population. Through the use of accessible research design, PWD can fully participate in research opportunities and contribute to advances in health care.

When defined under a model of functional impairment, estimates indicate that 54 to 60 million Americans live with disabilities, making people with disabilities one of the largest minority groups in the country. 9,10 Rates of identified disability incrementally increase with age, ranging from 2.3% for children younger than 3 years, 12.2% of school-aged children, 21% of those aged 15 years and older, and nearly 50% of those aged 65 years and older, indicating that, across the lifespan, disability is a near-universal experience. 11 For adults, 12.6% reported 1 type of functional limitation, and 8.2% reported disability in 2 or more domains (e.g., communicative, physical, vision, hearing, cognitive, emotional). 11 For children, the most prevalent conditions are neurodevelopmental or mental health conditions, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, speech disorder, autism, or learning disability, followed by physical conditions. 12

INCLUDING PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES IN HEALTH RESEARCH

Adults with disabilities live with a thinner margin of health than their nondisabled peers, and have a higher incidence of chronic conditions and health-related disparities. 10,13 Chronic conditions cause disability, and, conversely, individuals with pre-existing disability are at higher risk for developing secondary conditions. 14 When sampling working-age adults with chronic conditions, Gulley et al. found that 25% also reported a disability. 15 Conversely, 80% to 90% of those with disabilities reported at least 1 chronic condition. For children with chronic conditions, it appears that rates of disability are similar, or approximately 21% to 22%. 16

The mechanism behind the higher risk of developing secondary conditions appears to not be solely related to the pre-existing disability, but rather to malleable risk factors, such as obesity, physical inactivity, and smoking. 10 Adults with disabilities also report higher incidence of social risk, including poverty, unemployment, and limited education, as well as difficulty accessing preventive health care and health services. Data on children with disabilities indicate that familial social risk (e.g., low income, racial/ethnic minority, inadequate insurance, low parental education) influences access to health care services, 17–19 and children with disabilities demonstrate higher rates of obesity and physical inactivity than peers. 20,21

Equal and just representation in health research is necessary to improve outcomes for PWD. The influence of risk factors (e.g., chronic conditions, poverty, physical activity, access to preventive care), in interaction with a pre-existing disability, bears investigation in large-scale research studies. Disability must be seen as a demographic factor, like age, gender, race, and ethnicity, to accurately translate research findings and improve health outcomes for this patient population. For additional references supporting the claims presented in this article, see Appendix B, available as a supplement to the online version of this article at http://www.ajph.org .

IMPLICATIONS FOR EXTERNAL VALIDITY

Evidence suggests that people with disabilities are not included in large-scale research studies. 5,6,22,23 When researchers do not include PWD in health-related research, it can lead to serious concerns about the external validity of a study. In some instances, PWD are the people most seriously affected by a health condition; conversely, having a disability represents a risk factor for developing secondary health conditions. Therefore, not explicitly making efforts to include PWD potentially skews research findings toward more “healthy” patient populations.

One way that PWD and other groups are excluded from research studies is through overly rigid inclusion and exclusion criteria. Feldman et al. 6 examined the exclusion rate for children with disabilities from mainstream developmental research published in high-impact journals. The authors found that 66.7% of articles mentioning disability explicitly excluded those children; the rate was nearly 90% when they included articles that did not mention disability explicitly, with the assumption that no mention meant exclusion. Furthermore, the expert raters determined that in 54% of the cases in which children with disabilities were excluded, they could have participated without accommodations . The raters determined that 63% of studies could have included children with at least 1 disability type, when provided with accommodations, without compromising the integrity of the research study.

Van Spall et al. 24 examined the incidence of poorly justified exclusion and inclusion criteria in published randomized controlled trials in high-impact journals between 1994 and 2006 by using a series sampling technique. Poorly justified criteria included any stated criteria not justified as affecting the following areas: ability to provide informed consent, intervention or placebo would likely be harmful, intervention would likely be ineffective, or the effect of the intervention would be difficult to determine. The majority of trials (84.1%) contained at least 1 poorly justified exclusion criterion and one quarter of all exclusions were poorly justified in 61.5% of the randomized controlled trials. Specifically, of the studies examined, 11% excluded because of physical disability or functional status, 7.8% excluded because of cognitive impairment, 81.3% excluded because of medical comorbidities, 10.6% excluded because of language or communication barriers, and 72% excluded because of age (< 16 years or > 65 years).

Van Spall et al. noted that

The advantages of stringent eligibility criteria are achieved at the risk of excluding patients who may be more likely to represent the population treated in clinical settings and who would better test an intervention’s effectiveness. 24 (p137)

For example, a large Medicare study found that only 13% to 25% of patients discharged with heart failure met the enrollment criteria for 3 large randomized controlled trials that have largely influenced treatment of heart failure. 25 The exclusion of PWD because of overly strict or poorly justified criteria is not only an issue of social justice and equity but it also limits the generalizability of research findings in real-world settings.

The studies of Feldman et al. 6 and Van Spall et al. 24 provide some data for explicit (and unjustified) exclusion of PWD, chronic conditions, and other groups. However, it does not capture PWD who are implicitly excluded because of inaccessible research design. Just as stairs are not accessible to people in wheelchairs, research design may not be accessible to PWD. When PWD cannot access recruitment materials, read or sign consent forms, complete standardized interventions, access examination tables, or complete research measures, they are implicitly excluded from participation. 5

Making conscious efforts to include PWD in health research is imperative to provide equal and just representation for nearly 20% of the US population. High-quality scientific evidence that includes PWD is warranted to guide decisions related to risk, prevention, and treatment of health conditions. Through both explicit and implicit inclusion of PWD, we can enhance study design and conclusions. 5,23,26 The use of “accessible research design” provides a blueprint for the inclusion of PWD in mainstream health research.

This article provides a conceptual basis for accessible research design, as well as pragmatic examples of large-scale health research incorporating accessible research design. Williams and Moore 23 have provided an excellent overview and recommendations for Universal Design of Research for people with disabilities. In this article, we seek to broaden the idea of accessible research by considering 3 levels of implementation: (1) universal design, (2) accommodations, and (3) modifications. The pragmatics of conducting accessible research are derived from the work of Williams and Moore, as well as our work on several large scale studies: Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Toolbox, the National Children’s Study, and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survet (NHANES; see Appendix A, available as supplement to the online version of this article at http://www.ajph.org , to learn more about these studies).

The focus of this article is on mainstream quantitative epidemiological, public health, and outcomes research; a variety of resources are available for the reader interested in accessible research design for studying PWD with qualitative research 27,28 or surveys. 29

In addition, strategies outlined in this article focus on the nonbiological mechanisms related to research, including recruitment, consent, intervention, and measurement. Clinical or biomedical research might involve processes that are confounded by certain underlying causes of disability. For example, a new chemotherapy might interact with specific types of underlying conditions in ways that could have an impact on the outcomes of the study. Researchers should be conscientious about exclusion criteria to not unjustifiably exclude those with medical conditions unrelated to the biological process they are studying. The use of accessible research design will provide access for all eligible participants and ensure that those with disabilities have equal opportunity to participate in scientific research.

ACCESSIBLE RESEARCH DESIGN

The term “accessibility” is used to refer to a state in which an individual’s functional capacity and the functional demands of an environment are matched so the individual can effectively complete an activity. For example, an individual who uses a wheelchair can enter a building with a ramp because the demands of the environment (allows wheeled mobility) match the functional capacity of the individual (mobile with a wheelchair). However, when a ramp is not available, a person who does not walk cannot complete the activity because the environmental demands (climbing stairs) do not match the functional capacity of the individual.

In the context of research, lack of accessibility can affect a person’s participation in research activities in the areas of recruitment, consent, intervention, and measurement. The prospective design of the research study can be enhanced to include people with a wide range of functional capacities through the use of universal design, accommodations, and modifications. These 3 approaches are on a continuum from most broadly applicable to more narrowly focused. In other words, universal design allows for access to a broad range of people; accommodations may need to be provided to a smaller subset of people; and, finally, modifications are used when universal design and accommodations are not effective or appropriate.

Universal Design

Universal design means “designing all products, buildings and exterior spaces to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible.” 30 (p2) Universal design has been applied to a diverse array of environments and situations, including architecture, learning, Web-based interfaces, and playgrounds. Williams and Moore 23 proposed the term “Universal Design of Research,” which they defined as the “design of research so that all people can be included as potential participants, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.” 23 (p3) Using principles of universal design provides varying ways for people to participate in the research, which increases usability for people both with and without disabilities.

Table 1 outlines pragmatic strategies throughout the research process that would be considered “universal design.” These strategies are by no means exhaustive, but rather are meant to raise awareness of strategies that can be used with people with a wide range of abilities. Many of these strategies address more than 1 type of functional concern, which is the benefit of universal design. The 7 categories of functional impairments listed in Table 1 are the most relevant to consider when one is assessing accessibility.

TABLE 1—

Strategies for Universal Design for Conducting Accessible Research

Note. ADA = Americans With Disabilities Act; TTY = teletypewriter.

Familiarity with the population of interest is key to knowing which accessibility features of universal design are most relevant. For example, as Moore 26 outlined, for patients with diabetes, there is a significant incidence of visual, hearing, and mobility impairments. Keeping these functional impairments in mind can help determine which aspects of the research process may be most inaccessible in the participant population. For studies with a diverse sample, such as NHANES, providing the broadest amount of universal design features helps capture data from the most diverse group of participants. Universal design examples from NHANES are included in Appendix A.

Accommodations

Even when universal design is applied throughout the research process, there may be times when accommodations are needed to enable equal participation for PWD. Accommodations change how the task is accomplished so that respondents are able to participate in a task that they would otherwise be unable to complete. In other words, accommodations remove confounding influences of the assessment format, administration, or ways of responding. Accommodations are designed to keep the construct or essential elements consistent, while eliminating difficulties associated with functional deficits. 31 For example, a person with limited functional hand control may not be able to complete a pencil-and-paper memory test, yet the person’s memory may be intact. Allowing a proxy or some other means for logging a response would be an appropriate accommodation that will allow the participants to demonstrate their memory (the core construct) while removing the confounding influence of difficulty with hand control.

Accommodations are commonly used in educational assessment for children with disabilities, and have involved making changes to (1) the setting of a test, (2) the presentation of a test, (3) the mode of response to a test, and (4) the timing or scheduling of a test. 32 Extrapolating to the health research setting, making changes for an individual with a disability can involve the physical setting; how the measures, information, or interventions are presented (e.g., visual, auditory); the mode of response (e.g., verbal, pointing, clicking with mouse, writing); or the schedule (e.g., allowing for shorter testing sessions, or more time to complete a test).

The box on page 2141 outlines some strategies that address the setting, presentation, mode of response, and timing or scheduling that can be used throughout the research process. Like the universal design table, these are not exhaustive, but rather are meant as examples of common, pragmatic accommodations. We have included accommodation examples from NHANES in Appendix A.

Strategies for Accommodations for Conducting Accessible Research

Modifications

Ideally, if universal design, accommodations, or both are provided, people with disabilities should be able to participate in some or all research-related activities. Modifications represent a further alteration in standardized process, in that they may change the nature of the construct being assessed. 31 Modifications change the way in which the measure or test is given, or provide an alternate measure. For example, a modification might be to administer a sensitive measure (e.g., depression or sexual practices) via interview instead of using the electronic version the majority of participants are using. When an intervention or assessment is modified, it may be essential to determine whether the essential elements, or constructs, remain the same. For example, using a proxy to log responses in a timed recall test may be considered a modification if it interferes with measurement of the central construct (speed of recall).

Modifications come with internal validity concerns. When one is using alternate tests, there is concern regarding measurement equivalence. 33 Modified outcome measures are increasingly being examined for different disability populations, such as the 36-Item Short-Form Health Survey 34 and the PROMIS Physical Function Scale 35 for wheelchair users. These modified measures can aid researchers in choosing comparable measures for their population of interest.

PRACTICAL STUDY ISSUES

Early consideration of the accessibility needs of diverse users helps ensure that study materials and protocols are able to accommodate as wide a range of participants as possible. Generating a protocol that includes variations for people with disabilities provides guidance for research personnel, and eliminates the need for on-the-spot decisions that may alter the internal validity of the study. Protocols can and should include information on screening for accessibility needs, accessible research design (including universal design options, accommodations, and modifications), training, and quality control (including documentation of alterations in protocol).

Screening research participants for accessibility needs as part of the standard intake protocol can help ensure that the study team is adequately prepared to provide appropriate accommodations and supports. Screening provides the time for the study team to brainstorm for and plan accommodations and make necessary provisions to the testing protocol (e.g., additional time, specialized equipment, availability of a second administrator).

Screening should begin with initial contact with a potential participant. Language should be built into recruitment materials and consent forms informing participants that accommodations are available for people with disabilities, and providing a contact person for those accommodations. People with disabilities are experts on their needs, and this more “informal” self-identification process can be extremely valuable in planning for accommodations and modifications.

Once a participant is contacted, a set of guiding questions should be developed to identify any needs related to the functional requirements of the study protocol (e.g., reading, using a touchscreen, extended testing time). By emphasizing the functional requirements, participants are able to identify needs without necessarily providing a diagnostic label; for example, a parent may indicate the need for breaks for a child with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The box on this page provides some sample questions based upon our work with the NIH Toolbox measures; however, these will vary according to the functional requirements of the study in question.

Sample Prescreening Questions for Conducting Accessible Research

Finally, a set of more formal screening measures may be built into the study protocol to identify those who may have difficulty with the functional requirements of the study procedures. For example, in the NIH Toolbox computer-based tests, participants are guided through some training screens before beginning the actual measure. Should a participant have difficulty with the training items—for example, because of decreased ability to use a standard mouse or inability to read or see text—then specific universal design options, accommodations, or modifications may be implemented. Other options for formal screening might include a basic vision screener, reading a simple written passage, or using a touch screen.

Documentation of Accessible Research Design

The study protocol should guide research administrators in the process of utilizing universal design options, accommodations, and modifications once participants have been identified with having a disability that affects their ability to participate in study procedures. For example, in NHANES, once persons are identified as having a mobility impairment that has an impact on their ability to stand for the height measure, the administrator is guided to move on to other anthropometry protocols. In the NIH Toolbox, an accommodations manual was developed that outlines general points for working with PWD, as well as functional demands of each measure, potential accessibility issues, and guidelines for accommodations. 36 A sample of accessibility guidelines for a cognitive test (Oral Reading Recognition) can be found in Appendix A.

Preplanning for disability accommodations can also help study teams identify a minimal data set based on high-impact results or key end points. In NHANES, study domain experts were asked to identify those elements that were critical for assessment in advance. Therefore, if unexpected complications arose, the study team had clear guidance on how to proceed.

Training, Quality Control, and Documentation

Although disability is a fundamental part of the human experience, many health care professionals are not well trained in how to effectively work with people with disabilities. A 2009 report by the National Council on Disability indicated that

The absence of professional training on disability competency issues for health care practitioners is one of the most significant barriers preventing people with disabilities from receiving appropriate and effective health care. 37 (p13)

Consistent with the recommendations of Williams and Moore, 23 when one does not know how to include someone with a disability, one should consult someone who does (i.e., the potential research participant, another person with that disability, the child’s parent or guardian, or a health professional who works with persons with disabilities).

Just as adverse events are documented, so should alterations in protocol because of disability. Consistently documenting when alterations to the testing protocol are made is important for interpretation of results, as well as quality control. By documenting these alterations, researchers can better understand whether an alteration might have an impact on scoring or be related to an outlier in the data. Documentation of the testing alterations and accommodations can also ensure consistency on repeated assessments in longitudinal studies by ensuring the same accommodations are provided on subsequent visits. Key to this documentation is understanding whether alterations in protocol are considered “standard” or “nonstandard” administration. Universal design and accommodations do not present changes in the core task demands or the primary construct being assessed. As such, these alterations should be documented as “standard administration” with a note regarding the type of accommodation used. If an alteration in protocol has the potential to alter core task demands, it would be considered a modification and should be documented as “nonstandard administration.” Finally, if a participant is screened out of a measure, the reason should be documented. See Appendix A for examples of standard and nonstandard administration for the Toolbox Oral Reading Recognition test.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Future research should include systematic evaluation of the impact that reasonable accommodations and accessibility features have on derived scores in people with and without disabilities to evaluate the concept of differential boost. The concept of differential boost is based on the notion that test takers should not receive an undue advantage from reasonable accommodations. 38 To use an example from education, many individuals, regardless of their disability status, may benefit from extra time on an essay-based examination; therefore, providing a student with a disability with an accommodation of extra time may confer an unfair advantage. In contrast, provision of a screen reader is likely to only benefit students who are blind and really need these technologies. The notion of unfair advantage is a major barrier to the acceptance of accommodated versions of assessments by end users. Rigorous evaluation with disabled and nondisabled participants is recommended to evaluate equivalence, but is rarely done.

Research is also needed to develop and evaluate the equivalence of alternate measures for people for whom the traditional measure is inaccessible. For example, many older adults experience visual decline and blindness because of conditions such as glaucoma and macular degeneration. At the same time, older adults also have high rates of cognitive deficits, attributable to both age-related functional decline and pathological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. There is thus a critical need to develop equivalent nonvisual cognitive assessments to measure cognitive decline and dysfunction in this population.

To document the need for greater inclusion of people with disabilities in epidemiological, longitudinal, and clinical research, there is a need for the systematic evaluation of attrition rates in large cohort and clinical studies to determine the impact of inaccessibility and overly strict inclusion or exclusion criteria. As demonstrated in NHANES, there is also a need for systematic and evidence-based decisions to develop minimal data sets for measures. Initiatives such as the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health Core Set and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke’s Common Data Elements Initiatives seek to identify the most critical data for including in clinical research with target populations. 39,40

Public health must begin to recognize the importance of the inclusion of PWD in mainstream health research studies. There is a critical need for PWD to be recognized as a disparities population; as such, disability should be treated in research as another demographic factor, such as ethnicity, sex, or age. Federal funding agencies, such as the NIH and National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research must emphasize the importance of inclusion of people with disabilities, not only as a civil rights issue but also to enhance the scientific integrity and interpretability of research findings to real-world clinical and policy applications. Through the use of justifiable inclusion and exclusion criteria, and accessible research design, we can begin to include PWD and start to address health disparities in the 54 to 60 million people living with disabilities in the United States.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project was supported through funding from the National Institutes of Health Toolbox (contract HHS-N-260-2006-00007-C), the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research and Training Centers on Improving Measurement of Medical Rehabilitation Outcomes (grant H133B090024), and the National Children’s Study.

Aspects of this article were presented via poster presentation at the Fourth Annual Occupational Therapy Summit of Scholars in May 2015 and the Washington Occupational Therapy Association Conference in October 2015.

We would like to thank Ivey Miller, RTR, Division of Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for her careful review of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey content.

HUMAN PARTICIPANT PROTECTION

All of the studies described in this article had institutional review board approval, but institutional review board approval was not required for this article as it is a review of previously reported work.

Accessible Research: Lowering Barriers to Participation

• First Online: 01 December 2017

Cite this chapter

• Daniela Rudloff 4  

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In this chapter, I aim to provide a review and practical guidance on making research participation accessible by lowering barriers to participation. I outline how barriers to participation constitute barriers to representation. This is at odds with our ethos as qualitative researchers and there are strong ethical and methodological arguments for improving access to research participation. Individual sections discuss possible accommodations and adjustments throughout the research process, from the planning phase, to approaching and recruiting participants, preparing and presenting material, general communication with participants, up to presenting and disseminating research findings. I conclude by stressing that accessible research is necessary , possible and productive .

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Rudloff, D. (2018). Accessible Research: Lowering Barriers to Participation. In: Ciesielska, M., Jemielniak, D. (eds) Qualitative Methodologies in Organization Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65217-7_10

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Making Your Research More Accessible: A Guide for Researchers

In the world of academia, conducting research and publishing papers is only half the battle. The next and possibly even more critical task, making your work accessible and understood by others, is an art form in itself. This blog post is here to guide researchers on how to communicate their findings more effectively and thereby broaden the impact of their research.

Emphasizing on Clarity

Whether you are presenting a paper at a conference, discussing your work in a seminar, or writing a blog article, clarity should be your guiding principle. Using jargon and complex language may seem impressive, but it can often leave your audience lost and confused. Aim to communicate your ideas in the simplest manner possible. Always remember, if you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you probably don't understand it yourself.

Effective Visual Communication

The power of visual representation cannot be understated. Not everyone absorbs text in the same way, and many people digest information more thoroughly through visuals. Utilizing graphs, charts, and other illustrative diagrams can aid in making your research universally comprehensible. Remember, the purpose is to transfer knowledge, not to overwhelm with data.

Utilizing Digital Platforms

In the era of digital communication, not leveraging online platforms to showcase your research is indeed a missed opportunity. Websites, blogs, social networks, and online journals can significantly amplify your research reach. Adopting an open-access policy can also enhance the visibility and citations of your work. Using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies will make your research easier to discover online.

Public Engagement

Don't limit yourself to the academic world. Engaging with the public through popular science events, interacting with the media, contributing to science magazines, and even using social networks can make your research more known and accessible. The more people understand and appreciate your work, the more widespread your research impact will be.

Building Collaborative Networks

Academic research is not a solitary endeavor. Building collaborative relationships with fellow researchers, institutions, or even industries can lead to sharing of ideas, pooling of resources and fostering of interdisciplinary research approaches. Collaboration also opens doors to a broader audience and hence more visibility for your research.

Conclusively, while the process of communicating academic research might seem daunting, adopting proper strategies can make it less so. By ensuring clarity, utilizing visuals, embracing digital platforms, engaging the public, and building collaborative networks, you can make your research more accessible and impactful. As researchers, we must remember our responsibility goes beyond advancing knowledge; it also involves disseminating this knowledge as widely as possible.

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Why is accessibility important for your research paper?

The way in which research papers are read, used, and published is changing and developing faster than ever. With those changes comes more opportunities to make published research accessible to everyone, and at Taylor & Francis we are committed to helping authors do just that.

Quick links

What is accessibility, and digital accessibility.

Accessibility is widely understood as the processes and practices involved to make information, environments, products, and services available to everyone.

Digital accessibility refers to the process of making sure all digital products, such as websites, eBooks, videos, and audio materials are accessible to all users. To maintain digital accessibility, design and technology is used to remove any potential barriers from the user when they access the digital product.

People with digital access requirements

It is important to consider the full range of disabilities that can affect how people access digital content.

Auditory Deafness falls under four categories: conductive, sensorineural, auditory processing or mixed. People who are deaf may experience digital material such as videos or podcasts differently.

Cognitive Examples of cognitive or learning disabilities include, but are not limited to, memory loss, difficulties with communication, slow processing and forgetfulness. People with cognitive disabilities may find digesting a complicated table or diagram difficult.

Physical People who have divergent physical/mobility requirements may experience barriers to accessing digital content. For example, they may not be able to use a keyboard or mouse in the mainstream way.

Speech People with a speech or communication disability may experience difficulties creating or forming their speech. Voice recognition technologies, for example, may not be accessible to a person with a speech disability.

Visual People who are blind or have a decreased ability to see may experience difficulties processing variations of color or handling brightness. To access digital content they may use magnification and screen reader (text-to-speech) technology.

Assistive technology

Many people with disabilities use assistive technology to allow them to access digital content. Assistive technology includes assistive, adaptive and rehabilitative devices – some examples are:

Screen readers

Voice recognition software

Braille terminals

Screen magnifiers

Selection switches

Assistive listening devices

Inclusivity Making your research accessible promotes inclusivity. You’re helping to provide access to digital research, and thereby better access to education. By being inclusive with your research you are promoting equal access to life opportunities that stem from learning and gained knowledge.

Future-proofing If you prioritize making your research paper and articles accessible today, you will be future-proofing your content. It’s possible that meeting accessibility requirements will be a condition of submitting your manuscript in the future, so why not get ahead now?

Awareness Making your research accessible will help raise awareness among our communities regarding accessibility. You’ll be helping to spread the word, create discussions and highlight the importance of accessibility within the research community. Start by sharing this page with your colleagues, peers and other authors.

Accessibility policies You’ll be following  accessibility policies .

Discoverability By including alternative text, you are supporting  search engine optimization for your academic article .

Audience If you don’t prioritize accessibility when writing your paper, you’re decreasing the amount of people who can read your research. Making your research paper accessible expands your audience reach. By making sure all users can read your article, you’re increasing your readership, and in turn, increasing your chances of greater engagement and  research impact.

Real world impact Alongside making your research accessible, you’ll be supporting the movement of accessibility and making a real difference to the world. Join the community and help us to make changes which impact real people in the real world.

Research accessibility on Taylor & Francis Online

The video below explains how we are making the research we publish accessible to as many people as possible.

Stacy Scott

Head of Accessibility – Taylor & Francis Group

Chair of the Accessibility Action Group – Publishers Association

Making your research accessible

Now that you’ve read why accessibility is important, you might be wondering how you can help support accessibility and make your own research accessible. We’ve put together some useful steps you can take when writing your research paper to help make your article accessible.

Taylor & Francis and our commitment to accessibility

Taylor & Francis is committed to making sure all our products, platforms and websites are accessible to as wide an audience as possible. We are continually improving the quality and accessibility of our content, to address the needs of all customers, regardless of ability or situation.

To guide us in our efforts, we use the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the US Government Section 508 Standards, and W3C’s  Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0/2.1 . We are working toward the A and AA compliance levels of the WCAG 2.1.*

*Last updated 4th April 2022.

Here are some of the actions we’re taking to support accessibility

Journal articles are available as HTML, PDF and ePub3 format and include mark-up and structural elements to support the use of assistive technology.

Several of our key journals have started alternative text trials.

Taylor & Francis Online  introduced a new text to speech feature called ReadSpeaker  in 2019.

We have provided consistent global navigation links and each page has a breadcrumb trail of navigation leading back to the homepage. All pages on our websites contain a search box.

All our websites have been built to modern web standards using valid XHTML and CSS. Headings are used effectively to allow users of assistive technology to navigate our pages.

Alternative text was introduced into our eBook workflows in 2020.

We publish eBooks in both PDF and ePub3 format.

We launched a new author-facing website with contains our  alt text guide for books .

Our ePubs specifically contain accessibility features for structured navigation and reading order.

Our eBook content is designed with a logical reading order and includes mark-up and heading structure to ensure easy navigation and compatibility with assistive technology.

Learn more about the actions we’re taking at Taylor & Francis to make sure our products, platforms, and websites are accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

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Making Scientific Research Accessible to All

Melissa Hagemann is a program manager in the Open Society Foundations Information Program. She's also on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation , which operates Wikipedia. She spoke with us about the Open Access movement.

What is "Open Access"?

Open Access refers to the free online availability of research literature. It was first defined at a meeting organized by the Open Society Foundations in 2001, which led to the Budapest Open Access Initiative .  This initiative outlined two strategies for developing OA:

• Open Access Journals, which are journals, freely available worldwide, which do not rely upon the traditional subscription-based business model to generate their revenue; and
• Open Repositories, or archives where all scholarly research articles published by those associated with a university or within a discipline can be deposited.

In 2003, we added a third strategy, which is to advocate for public access to publicly funded research.

What are some of the most notable accomplishments of the open access movement so far?

Probably the single most important victory was a mandate adopted by the U.S. Congress which stipulates that all research funded by the National Institutes of Health (about $29 billion annually) be made freely available online.

While the NIH is the largest funder of research in the world, the OA movement has worked with governments and universities throughout the world to adopt similar mandates, and today there are 230 of them. In addition, there are over 5,500 OA journals and over 1,700 open repositories .

What major obstacles does the movement face at this moment?

As Open Access is so new, one of our main challenges is simply raising awareness of it and explaining the benefits of this new model.  At the same time, you can imagine that many within the publishing industry haven’t always been keen supporters of OA.

Since we launched the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002, we have reached out to publishers to explain the model and how they could benefit from it. However the journal publishing industry is still incredibly profitable and can be a formidable adversary at the policy level. But we feel that our message of public access to publicly funded research is strong, and it seems many policymakers do as well!

But I’m curious: How can the publishing industry benefit from Open Access? Wouldn’t they say they need the money to continue publishing? How do you persuade them that OA is a good thing?

While OA journals are freely available online, about half of them charge a processing fee (anywhere from $500 to $3,000 or so) per article. So there are commercial OA journal publishers which are doing quite well. Actually one of the largest OA publishers, BioMed Central , was purchased by Springer (the second largest scientific journal publisher) in 2008, and Springer pledged to keep all of the journals OA.

While the journal publishing industry is still profitable, many libraries are being forced to cut their budgets, so they won’t be able to keep up with the increases in journal subscription prices. That’s one of the reasons why librarians are so supportive of the OA movement, as they need alternatives to the high-priced commercial journals. Today university libraries are launching OA publishing funds through which they support those affiliated with their institutions to publish in OA journals which charge an article processing fee. Economic research (specifically that of John Houghton ) has shown a savings if we move towards an OA model.

And one of the ironies of the journal publishing industry is that while the cost of journal subscriptions can sometimes be very high, the authors of the journal articles and the peer reviewers are not paid for their work.  This can help to explain why this industry has been so profitable to date.

As I mentioned, the Open Society Foundations try to reach out to publishers to collaborate on OA. When we launched the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers issued a press release criticizing the initiative and stating that they were very skeptical that any publishers would be interested in the model. So we talked with their leadership about OA and they finally agreed that we could co-organize a workshop to explain the model to their members (i.e., the publishers).

At the first workshop in 2002, we explained the model and the publishers had many questions; in 2003, one of the publishers (Oxford University Press) talked about how they thought the model could work for them. By the final workshop in 2004, Oxford discussed how they had experimented with OA with several of their journals, and due to the high number of authors who had elected to pay the article processing fee (this fee is usually covered by the authors’ research grant or institution) Oxford decided to convert one of their flagship journals to OA. They have since started their own OA program, Oxford Open .

What’s your professional background, and what drew you to working in this field?

I’ve worked in the field of scholarly communication for more than 15 years. I managed the Open Society Foundations library program based in Budapest, and ran a program which distributed hard copies of scientific journals to universities and Academies of Science in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

We saw that shipping hard copies of journals was not sustainable, yet, due to the high price of many subscription-based journals, access to scholarly content is often impossible for many in the developing and transition countries in which the Open Society Foundations work. A desire to look for alternative publishing models led us to organize the meeting in Budapest which defined Open Access.

I feel privileged to work on OA as I’ve seen for myself how much access to scholarly content is needed by those in developing countries, as well as by the taxpayers who fund the research.  We’ve heard stories about doctors in Malawi who desperately need access to medical articles to properly treat their patients, but don’t have the funds necessary to access the articles.

And if you’re not affiliated with a leading research library, you face a similar situation. If a member of your family develops a serious illness and you go online to find information on the condition, you are usually asked to pay $30 or more to read a single article, which, quite often, was supported by your tax dollars.

And finally, one of the beauties of OA, in my view, is that it allows those in developing countries to both access and contribute to the global research community.

What is Open Access Week?

Open Access Week is a global event, now entering its fourth year, which provides the academic and research community an opportunity to learn about the potential benefits of OA and to inspire wider participation in establishing OA as a new norm in scholarship and research. Hundreds of participating sites – including research funding agencies, academic institutions, and other organizations – in over 60 countries are using OA Week as a chance to connect local action with global momentum. In 2009, the week spurred the announcement of actions including expanded OA publication funds, the adoption of institution-wide OA policies, and the release of new reports on the societal and economic benefits of OA.

There are OA Week groups in countries from Mongolia, to Tanzania, to the Netherlands.  You can check out a full list of the events organized by these groups by visiting www.openaccessweek.org/events .

How can others get involved in advancing the issue?

Participating in an event during OA week is a great way to start! Then I would suggest learning more about OA, and OASIS is one of the best resources for information on the OA movement.

• If you're a student, I recommend connecting with the Right to Research Coalition .
• If you're an academic, you can self-archive copies of your research articles in your institutional repository or submit your article to an OA journal . You can also advocate for your institution to adopt an OA mandate at your university; 230 mandates have been adopted worldwide (see www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup ).
• If you're in a developing or transition country, the EIFL Open Access Program offers a wealth of support and services for librarians, academics, policymakers, and funders in these countries to tap into.
• If you're based in the United States, you can support the Alliance for Taxpayer Access , which advocates for public access to publicly funded research in the U.S.

I’ll stop there, as I don’t want to overwhelm you with too much information, but there are many, many ways to get involved with Open Access and many ways to benefit from the scholarly content which Open Access makes available.

Open Access Week takes place October 18–24.

Until August 2014, Laura Brahm was senior content strategist for the Open Society Foundations.

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Accessibility in Science: How Can We Make Science More Accessible? 

Let’s be honest—we scientists don’t always present our science in ways that are accessible to everyone. Nor is lab-based science always accessible. Explore what accessibility in science is and how we can all make science more accessible and inclusive.

Published July 12, 2022

I am a results-driven scientist and science communicator interested in the use of protein engineering and integrative structural biology tools in drug discovery. I hope to leverage my experiences in industry and academia to improve global health and to make scientific research as accessible to as many people as possible.

Listen to one of our scientific editorial team members read this article. Click  here  to access more audio articles or subscribe.

Have you ever thought about accessibility in science? Let’s be honest—we scientists don’t always present our science in ways that are accessible to everyone. Nor is lab-based science always accessible.

I want to explore what accessibility is and highlight how we can all make science more accessible and inclusive.

What is Accessibility?

The topic of accessibility is fraught with nuance and complexity. The word “accessibility” can mean different things to different people in different contexts. According to Alistair Duggin, “ something can be accessible to some people while being inaccessible to others ”. (1) With this in mind, and because, as Dr. Julia Sarju states—language matters, (2) I’ve listed some key definitions of terms we’ll be mentioning in this article:

What is Disability?

Many aspects of everyday life are built for the mythical “average” person with perfect vision, hearing, and physical ability. In reality, very few people are like this. Many people live with visible and invisible disabilities. (2)

Some conditions fluctuate while others are chronic. Vision and hearing can range from almost perfect to nonexistent, with a full spectrum in between. Memory and literacy levels can also vary for different reasons, including neurodiversity [e.g., autism, Asperger’s syndrome , attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and dyslexia], poor mental health, fatigue, and stress.

Physical ability also varies between individuals because of differences in mobility, dexterity, and strength. Most of us also experience temporary (i.e., due to illness or injury) or situational disabilities (i.e., poor hearing in a noisy room or poor vision in bright sunlight). (2,3)

Is the Science Research Community Accessible?

Disability shouldn’t limit accessibility in science—but it does. (4) Diversity of thought and life experiences are essential to promoting good science, but if people who want to contribute to science are kept out of it due to lack of access, this isn’t good for science. (5) We should all be concerned about this.

Think about the lab you work in—is it accessible, for example, to someone in a wheelchair? Do you have access to ergonomic pipettes suitable for someone with repetitive stress injury (RSI), painful joints, or arthritis? Have you been to a conference that provides different accessibility options for attendees? For me, the answer is no, and this is likely the same for many of you.

Accessibility in the Lab

Because experiences of disability are broad, there are various ways in which science is inaccessible. I’ll give some examples below.

Physical Accessibility

Traditionally, wet labs have been designed for people with no physical challenges. (6) People who find it difficult or cannot sit on a lab stool and those who need to use walking aids need adjustable benches and wheelchair access to the labs. (7) While this requires additional resources and planning, it’s certainly doable and should be considered in all research institutes and organizations.

Neurodivergent Accessibility

Neurodivergence is a term used to describe someone who thinks, learns, or behaves in a way that is different from what is considered “normal”. Neurodivergent disabilities are not always visible.

People with autism can be extremely sensitive to their environment. This means that their senses (i.e., hearing, touch, sight, smell, and taste) can be overstimulated.

Employers and PIs could provide Sunflower lanyards (8) or JAM (Just a minute) (9) cards to improve accessibility in the lab and even at conferences. Both cards are recognized symbols of hidden disabilities or communication barriers.

An individual can use these cards to let others know they need extra time and understanding in a simple and private way if they get overwhelmed or are in a situation where they can’t explain themselves.

While there’s no obligation on an individual to disclose their disability, in the case of hidden disabilities like autism, without disclosure, employers and organizations might not be able to implement the necessary changes to improve accessibility. (10)

Employers should encourage disclosure, provide safe spaces to do so, and be willing to follow through with tangible actions. For example, flexible working can let people work early or late when there are fewer people around and fewer stimuli. Or employers can change harsh lab lights for something softer.

To learn more about neurodivergence, you may want to read Dr Camilla Pang’s book Explaining Humans in which she writes about her experiences as a scientist with autism spectrum disorder.

Science Communication Accessibility Issues

Colors and fonts in presentation slides.

One of my biggest pet peeves is what Carla Albinagorta calls “rainbow presentations ” (i.e., slides with eye-watering bright colors, like lime green). It’s just so unnecessarily bright!

Colorblindness

About 1 in 20 people have some form of color blindness and cannot tell the difference between specific colors. (11,12) There are different types of color blindness, including red-green (challenging to distinguish between red and green), blue-yellow (challenging to distinguish between blue and green, and yellow and red), and complete color blindness, which is rare. (13)

Therefore, it’s essential to consider what color pallet you use for your figures and presentation slides. Some software (e.g., GraphPad Prism) now comes with several “colorblind safe” color palettes. To make your data more accessible, you can check whether your figures are “colorblind safe” using this handy color blindness simulator , or you can use these accessible color pallets .

Problematic Fonts

Font colors and styles can also negatively affect how some people can access and understand the data, with font style being particularly complex for some. Serif fonts (e.g., Times Roman) are generally less readable for some individuals because they have tails and ticks at the ends of some letters, making them more difficult to read. Therefore, stick to sans-serif fonts (e.g., Arial). (14)

Some studies have even suggested that dyslexic readers prefer more “humanist” fonts (i.e., fonts with unique forms for the letters b and d). (14) Several unique fonts, including Sylexiad, Open Dyslexic, and Dyslexie, have been developed to help dyslexic readers. (14,15) Before selecting your font for your next presentation or even grant proposal, you might want to select one from this list of accessible fonts .

Promoting Accessibility in Research

Often, it is a lack of awareness that makes things inaccessible. Therefore, institutions should train managers and people in positions of authority to help them understand the different aspects that affect accessibility (e.g., neurodiversity, physical disabilities, and impairments) and how to support people in the lab.

Accessibility in Science: What Can You Do Today?

We can all do our part to promote positive changes that improve accessibility in science. But what immediate actions can you take? We’ve listed some suggestions below:

• Consider color blindness and neurodivergency in your presentations.
• Consider using fonts suitable for dyslexic readers in your presentations and grant proposals.
• Read Dr. Julia Sarju’s article on how we can achieve “…Genuine Inclusion of Disabled Scientists and Science Students…”. (2)
• Take a look at Dr Camilla Pang’s book Explaining Humans to learn more about autism spectrum disorder from a scientist’s point of view.
• Read your institution’s information. Most institutions have guidelines, policies on accessibility, and provision of assistive technologies and services for disabled users—inform yourself by reading these guidelines and policies.
• Speak to your supervisor, lab managers, and colleagues!

Please raise awareness of the issues of accessibility in science, and if you have any suggestions for what we can do to increase it, feel free to put them in the comments below.

• What we mean when we talk about accessibility – Accessibility in government . [Accessed 2022 Jun 7].
• Sarju JP. (2021) Nothing About Us Without Us – Towards Genuine Inclusion of Disabled Scientists and Science Students Post Pandemic . Chemistry – A European Journal . 27 (41):10489–94.
• Types of Disabilities | Usability & Web Accessibility . [Accessed 2022 Jun 7].
• Disability shouldn’t limit accessibility in science . (2021) Commun Biol. 4 (1):1–1.
• We need diverse representation in STEM, and social media can help . [Accessed 2022 Jun 7].
• 3. Barriers faced by students with disabilities in science laboratory and practical space settings . [Accessed 2022 Jun 7].
• Tuosto K et al . (2020) Making science accessible . Science 367 (6473):34–5.
• Hidden Disabilities. A symbol for non-visible disabilities . [Accessed 2022 Jun 7].
• Jam Card. Just a minute of patience . [Accessed 2022 Jun 7].
• Hidden Disabilities. Non-visible disabilities in the workplace . [Accessed 2022 Jun 7].
• NIH. National Eye Institute. Color Blindness . [Accessed 2022 May 21].
• Nichols D. Coloring for Colorblindness . [Accessed 2022 Jun 7].
• NIH. National Eye Institute. Types of Color Blindness . [Accessed 2022 Jun 7].
• Full Fabric. How to design visual learning resources for neurodiverse students . [Accessed 2022 Jun 7].
• Sylexiad HR. (2008) A typeface for the adult dyslexic reader . Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. 1 (3):275–91.

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Making Science More Accessible

By considering the general public a key audience, researchers can generate more enthusiasm, trust and funding for science.

When a reporter calls, researchers can be ready to share their science with a few simple tips for effective communication.

Talking to the media is one of the best ways researchers can communicate the importance of what they do to the general public, but some scientists are apprehensive of the media, wary their work could get oversimplified or misrepresented, or just uneasy about how to do it.

Judith Gordon, PhD

Despite these worries, scientists and the media can have an effective and mutually beneficial relationship, helping to build greater public trust and support for science. Many University of Arizona Health Sciences faculty have learned firsthand how fulfilling it can be to practice effective communication for a general audience.

“Working with the media is really rewarding,” said Judith Gordon, PhD , associate dean of research for the College of Nursing . “Once you start, you discover how pleasant an experience it is. It ends up being really fun.”

Building trust

Many researchers with media experience say they feel obligated not to keep their science sequestered in laboratories and medical journals, and see communication with the public as vital to their overall goal to improve human health and potential.

Janko Nikolich-Žugich, MD, PhD

“We’re not functioning in a vacuum. We have responsibilities to society, not only in terms of the work we do, but in terms of communicating our science to the public, to the media, to elected officials and to our own communities that pay for our work,” said Janko Nikolich-Žugich, MD, PhD , professor and head of the Department of Immunobiology in the College of Medicine – Tucson . “Being able to translate what you do so your neighbors understand its importance is an exceptionally important part of the mission of being a biomedical scientist and a doctor.”

Many Health Sciences researchers point out that when people don’t understand or trust science, they are less likely to support funding for research or follow the guidance of scientists.

One way to build trust is to talk about the scientific process so people can develop more realistic ideas of what science can and cannot do.

“It’s very important to let people know about the process from discovery to getting a technology into their hands, to manage expectations, to know that sometimes it takes time to get there,” said Frederic Zenhausern, PhD, MBA , professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix . “Otherwise, people think you will cure cancer tomorrow.”

Collaborating with communicators

Kacey Ernst, PhD, MPH

All colleges, and many centers and departments, have dedicated communicators who are ready to support faculty to achieve successful interactions with the media.

“I would encourage faculty to reach out to the resources in their college to help them figure out how to spread the word about the great work they’re doing,” Dr. Gordon said. “The media is the conduit through which we reach the general public.”

Communicators also can help faculty field interview requests from the media. In May, Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health Professor Kacey Ernst, PhD, MPH , and Associate Professor Paloma Beamer, PhD , wrote a piece for The Conversation that offered guidance to people concerned about air travel during the pandemic. It became the first article for The Conversation penned by UArizona faculty to surpass 1 million page views, and the authors relied on their college communicator, Shipherd Reed, MA , in the resulting flurry of media attention.

“Paloma did a ton of interviews. Shipherd really helped her navigate them,” Dr. Ernst said.

Click infographic to open full-size, printable PDF in a new window.

Many reporters aim to keep their writing at an eighth-grade reading level, which makes it crucial for scientists to convey important points in easy-to-understand language. A communicator coaching a scientist on how to do an effective interview will help figure out how to make key points accessible.

Jun Wang, PhD

“Part of our job responsibility is teaching. Talk to reporters just like we teach our students,” said Jun Wang, PhD , associate professor at the College of Pharmacy . “Start from the basics. Don’t use scientific jargon or complicated scientific terms.”

Many scientists worry about oversimplifying their work, but distilling key concepts into simple and straightforward bullet points can help clarify the message. Repeating important messages can also help reporters understand what to emphasize.

“Keep your points to a minimum, maybe three to four points, max, that you reiterate,” Dr. Ernst said.

Making simple and clear points is also a way to counter misinformation, such as fears surrounding vaccination or conspiracy theories about COVID-19.

“Part of my responsibility is to convince as many people as possible that science is real,” said Dr. Wang.

“It’s our duty as scientists to convey information to the public that they can use to make better decisions, because the people who spread misinformation are more than happy to get in front of a camera to grab that mic,” Dr. Ernst added. “If you don’t get out in front of it really quickly, pseudoscience can get really entrenched.”

How to Make Your Research Data Accessible, Not Just Available

February 14, 2024

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All You Need to Know About Open Access

Open Access is a rapidly developing area of scholarly publishing. In 2020, it surpassed subscription-based publishing globally . Also, since the 2000s, governments around the world have been implementing increasingly strict legislations requiring Open Access publication. We will provide you with all the information you need about Open Access and open science and how they work. Further, we will keep you updated with any changes and developments in the industry or national policy.

Definition of Open Access

Open Access (OA) is a model for publishing scholarly research that makes information, typically scholarly articles, immediately available to readers at no cost. The research is often free to reuse for scholarly purposes.

In short, some of the goals of OA are:

• Availability and reusability of scientific research for the public;
• Accessibility and transparency of scientific communication;
• Facilitating scientific collaboration;
• Transparency for the methodology, observation, and collection of data.

OA is becoming the dominant model for publishing scholarly work because of these benefits. Let’s delve deeper into the specifics of how Open Access works.

What is open science?

Open Access is part of open science, which is an umbrella term that advocates for making sure data, evaluation, and peer review are openly accessible, among other things. If Open Access aspires to make the results of the scientific process (articles) open, then open science seeks to open the entire research process.

Overall, open science aims to make scientific research transparent and more collaborative. As an umbrella term, advocates for open science approach it from many different aspects. We explore these diverse aspects below.

All you need to know about Open Access

We outline the range of topics that have been explored on the Blog with links to the full articles. We primarily focus on Open Access, also exploring topics that encompass open science.

Creative Commons licenses and Open Access copyright

Copyright plays a big role in Open Access publishing. After all, it’s the copyright holder who decides whether access is open or restricted.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses were created to fill the space between traditional copyright and the public domain. Creative Commons-licensed works can be copied, distributed, and elaborated on more easily, which is hugely beneficial to the production of knowledge. This is because they clearly define the rights of both the author and also the user accessing the material.

Simply, they let the author grant public permission to use their work under copyright law subject to the author’s preferred conditions. Also, from a reader’s perspective, they answer the question ‘What can I do with this work?’. Essentially, CC licences set the rules for the use of OA material.

In our article Open Access Copyright and Creative Commons Licenses , we outline the different variations of Creative Commons licenses and explore how they are applied in OA publishing.

Ethics in Open Access publishing

A major component of scholarly publishing is ethics. Ethics collectively determine the actions and values of members in the community.

As Open Access quickly becomes the preferred publishing model, new challenges are emerging. Threats include the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence and AI-generated content, misinformation, and financial burdens for academics and publishers.

Ethics must be maintained by the community. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) aims to practically outline the ways ethics should be practised in academic publishing and how to deal with cases of scientific misconduct.

Many publishers, including MDPI, adhere to COPE’s guidelines in their editorial processes and also include their own practices and policies on how to best implement ethical scholarly publishing.

In our article Ethics in Open Access Publishing , we explore the responsibilities associated with maintaining ethics in OA publishing for the diverse roles in academia.

Leading female voices in Open Access publishing

For International Women’s Day (IWD) 2024, the focus was Inspire Inclusion. Having a diverse and inclusive community is key to achieving the aims of Open Access—removing all barriers to producing and accessing research.

Heather Joseph is the Executive Director of SPARC. She believes that “Open Access is not the end goal. It is an enabling strategy”. Open knowledge is her vision of an ecosystem where all research objects across the research lifecycle are made freely available. This would encourage more interaction through the process of research, rather than just after publication.

Eva Mendez is an expert in metadata and a Tenured Professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. In a 2023 book, she explains how OA and AI must evolve together to benefit science the most. Mendez urges that we actively preserve what underpins the scientific process: principles of honesty, trustworthiness, and transparency.

Finally, Marta Teperek is the programme leader for FAIR Data and is an advocate for data management and openness. she advocates for data champions—local advocates for good data management and sharing policies. These data champions can help share skills and create tailored data management workflows, specific to individual research groups.

In our article Leading Female Voices in Open Access Publishing , we explore the work and ideas of these three women in much more detail.

How MDPI supports scientific communities

Open Access Week 2023 focused on fostering a community mindset. We wanted to showcase the ways in which MDPI is dedicated to supporting scientific communities.

In short, the article outlines the specific ways MDPI achieves this:

• Offering waivers and discounts on article processing charges.
• Offering special discounts for societies affiliated with MDPI journals and institutions that are part of our Institutional Open Access Program.
• MDPI offers a range of awards to researchers, typically on a journal-by-journal basis.
• Special Issues are collections of papers centred around a subject of interest and are led by Guest Editors. Guest Editing provides a unique opportunity for scholars.

MDPI supports scientific communities by offering simple and flexible options for researchers. In our article, MDPI Supports Scientific Communities , we explore how in more detail.

Open Access policies around the world

Open Access policies or mandates are rules or requirements set by governments, funding agencies, or institutions that require work to be published in an OA format.

How strict the requirements are can vary, with some suggesting and supporting OA publication and others requiring that all publications be published in a specific repository or journal. Also, different governments or institutions will have their own ways of achieving OA, via repositories or journals, for example.

Countries around the world are applying policies and mandates to varying degrees, often reflecting a government’s aims.

Our article Open Access Around the World outlines policies in various countries, including the USA, China, and the EU. It links to articles that explore each country’s policies in greater detail.

Open Access values and academia

The history of academic research is linked to technological advances in the pursuit of producing and disseminating knowledge internationally.

Academia’s history tends to be traced back to the ancient world, with Plato’s olive groves, the Library of Ashurbanipal, and the Library of Alexandria.

The printing revolution in the 15 th century enabled the mass printing of texts. And later, in the 17 th century, scientific journals were created, growing rapidly in the 19 th century. Subscriptions to such journals became the basic model for scholarly communication until the mid-20 th century.

However, the digital revolution created an opportunity to innovate. The Internet significantly reduced the costs of, increased access to, and sped up the publishing of academic research.

In our article, Open Access Values are Older Than You Think , we outline this history and also explain how the OA movement emerged to connect with academia’s ancient tradition of enabling the open spread of knowledge.

What is the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information?

Data in the form of analytics and indicators are growing increasingly important when measuring productivity and setting priorities in academia. The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, released on 16 April 2024, recognises the rising importance of data and aims to ensure it’s open.

The Declaration homepage defines research information as metadata associated with the conduct and communication of research. These data are often stored in bibliographic databases, software archives, data repositories, and research information systems.

It is a community initiative that emerged from a workshop with over 25 experts interested in changing the research landscape. The Declaration revolves around four commitments:

• We will make openness the default for the research information we use and produce.
• We will work with services and systems that support and enable open research information.
• We will support the sustainability of infrastructures for open research information.
• We will support collective action to accelerate the transition to openness of research information.

In our article What is the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information? , we break down the specifics of the declaration, analyse its contents, and also outline its next steps.

What is the Budapest Open Access Initiative?

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) marked the beginning of the OA movement. In 2002, its members coined and defined OA and outlined the principles of free accessibility and usability behind it.

Before 2002, almost all journals ran subscription-based models. Around the 1990s, prices began to rise much faster than inflation. This is known as the ‘serials crisis’.

The BOAI defines Open Access to literature as “free availability on the public internet”. It recommends self-archiving by depositing research in repositories or by publishing in fully OA scholarly journals.

The twentieth anniversary statement concluded: “OA is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends, above all, to the equity, equality, usability, and sustainability of research.”

In our article Looking Back at the Budapest Open Access Initiative , we explore the declaration. From this, we reflect on its development and the support it has received as OA continues to grow.

What is visibility in Open Access publishing?

One of the most widely advertised benefits of publishing Open Access is increased visibility. Yet it’s not always clear what “visibility” means.

Essentially, the visibility of a piece of research (whether it’s an article or a book) is defined by the size of its audience, the extent of its reach, and any engagement the research generates.

Although there may be other factors involved, the visibility of a piece of research can be determined by looking at three key figures: its number of downloads, citations, and online mentions.

Visibility in OA publishing is largely optimized through online mentions. OA publishers tend to publicize their books via social media to disseminate research as widely as possible.

In our article Visibility in Open Access Publishing , we explore how these different forms of visibility work and specifically explore their utility for Open Access books.

Why submitting to an Open Access journal costs money

The answer to the question of “who pays for Open Access?” is related to the dissemination model. Traditionally, the costs involved in the publishing of articles was entirely based on the reader. Readers would have to pay for access to the content, usually via their institutions.

For OA journals, the author typically pays what is called an article processing charge. This helps to fund the journal’s editorial process.

There are several different options available to authors, including waivers, grants, subsidies, and sponsorships, that can help authors cover these costs. In addition, the costs involved in publication vary quite significantly, with some journals not charging anything.

In our article Why Does Open Access Cost Money? , we outline the costs of OA and how this differs between the various models of OA publishing.

Open Access and MDPI

MDPI is the largest Open Access publisher in the world and is leading the transition to open science.

We are committed to ensuring you stay up to date with information about Open Access. Therefore, we will be updating this post monthly with articles explaining how OA works and other topics in open science.

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The Art of Making Science Accessible and Relevant to All Students

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Corrected : An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Oklahoma had adopted the Next Generation Science Standards. The state created science standards based on the K-12 Framework for Science Education.

On the island of Oahu in Hawaii, 2nd graders weave mats, baskets, or other objects from the local hala plant. In northeastern Oklahoma, middle schoolers investigate why light makes some surfaces work like windows and others like mirrors.

Thousands of miles apart, those projects have something powerful in common: They were designed with equity in mind. The lesson writers deliberately chose, as anchors for the lessons, natural phenomena that all students know equally and can see in their own lives.

Centering science lessons on phenomena that are universal—like light—or deeply rooted in a region’s culture or location—like the hala plant—can make science more relevant and interesting for students. But they can also have a powerful role in building equity, since all students begin with something they know.

“I’m not going to have students investigate the chemical reaction of the family silver tarnishing, because not all kiddos are going to have that experience in their lives,” said Rebecca Morales, the science-curriculum coordinator in the Broken Arrow, Okla., school district. “I try to get my teachers thinking about choosing phenomena that all students as humans can consider.”

Conversations like these are unfolding across the country, as more than 40 states implement the Next Generation Science Standards , or standards based on their underlying Framework for K-12 Science Education .

Equity is woven through the NGSS and their framework; the documents frame expectations for all students, not just those aiming for science careers. Phenomena-based instruction is central to the standards, which envision moving away from rote facts to questions that spark students’ natural curiosity.

“As a science teacher, I was trained to look at topics and facts,” said Peter McLaren, who co-authored the NGSS and now trains teachers on using them. Starting with questions about natural phenomena “is a big change, and a lot of teachers are having a hard time with it.”

Drawing on Culture, Place

Collaborative projects have been springing up around the country to help teachers create equitable lessons anchored in natural phenomena. The hala lesson , for instance, took shape when several teachers in Hawaii, linked online through state-sponsored professional development, worked with Brett Moulding, another NGSS author, to craft science lessons that drew on local culture and traditions.

Mikioi Wichman, the K-5 science, technology, engineering and math teacher at Manoa Elementary School in Honolulu, was in that group. The teachers wanted to build a lesson for a 2nd grade standard that explores how elements in nature can come apart and reassemble into something with a different function.

Their first thought was to use Legos, Wichman said. But Moulding pressed them to choose something that would add cultural richness and a sense of place to the lesson. They hit on the hala plant, which is common around Hawaii. Native Hawaiian and Polynesian voyagers wove it into sleeping mats, baskets, and canoe sails. Even now, students can see hala hats and baskets in local stores, Wichman said.

Over several class meetings, Wichman introduces her students to hala leaves gathered from the local neighborhood. They study the plant’s features, such as its long, slender leaves, and learn about its history. They weave mats, take them apart, and brainstorm about other ways to weave them. The children have produced many creative solutions, from baskets and bookmarks to bracelets and tiny fish, Wichman said. Then they write in their journals about the principles they learned.

Wichman said the lesson has given all her students, regardless of their race, class, or cultural backgrounds, a way to enter science on equal footing, through something they all share.

“No matter where they come from, they’re all here in the Manoa Valley,” she said.

Starting with something children already know isn’t just smart from an equity perspective, Moulding said. It also helps students learn by giving them a base to which they can “attach” new knowledge, a constructivist idea that runs through the NGSS and their framework, he said.

He encourages teachers to take a scientific phenomenon and adapt it to reflect their students’ local surroundings. To study the ways organisms adapt to where they live, for instance, Hawaiian students could study the feral chickens that are common on the islands and how they’ve changed their color and egg-laying patterns over time in response to local conditions.

In northwestern Nebraska, children could study the Sand Hill deer mouse, whose fur has lightened over time to blend in with the color of the sandy soil, Moulding said.

“Phenomena that are relevant to students, whether it’s because of their culture or their place, are more accessible for all students,” he said.

Moulding and other science educators have assembled more than 300 free equity-focused science lessons for the NGSS on a website called #Going 3D with GRC .

Access to well-designed lessons, even paired with good professional development, isn’t enough to build equitable science instruction at scale, some experts say.

A research project called ACESSE , funded by the National Science Foundation, has been exploring systems and practices that bring all aspects of the education system—from the classroom teacher to district and state curriculum leaders, and even an interstate brain trust—into play to produce equitable science instruction.

At the classroom level, that work can look like Stacy Beausoleil’s lessons at Sequoyah Middle School in Broken Arrow. Working closely with Morales, her science coordinator, Beausoleil has been thinking about how to make her science instruction more equitable.

That thinking plays out in her lessons, with the natural phenomena she chooses as anchors. Using free resources from OpenSciEd , Beausoleil recently taught a unit on light, an NGSS standard for 7th grade. Starting with a video clip of the TV character Mr. Bean goofing around in a two-way mirror, students theorized about the behavior of light on various surfaces. They created a scale model and re-enacted the scenario. She assigned students to find examples in their own lives of how different surfaces affect light.

“They came back full of stories,” Beausoleil said. One girl reported that when she passed a restaurant at night, the window was so reflective that she used it to fix her hair, forgetting that customers inside could see her. Another noticed how she could see her reflection in a pond, but she could also see the sand at the bottom.

That assignment shows how equity has affected not just the natural processes Beausoleil chooses, but the way she assigns out-of-school work. She tries to create assignments that put no child at a disadvantage.

Using light as an instructional anchor, and sending students home to investigate it works because it “deals with an everyday thing that all kids have the privilege of accessing, in their houses, their mobile homes, or even in the cars they’re living in temporarily.”

Beausoleil has changed the way she carries out formative assessment. Instead of using multiple-choice quizzes, she asks students to model their thinking in illustrations and then discusses them. At first, they’re one-on-one conversations. That lets students use their own words, without worrying about “correct” vocabulary. It offers Beausoleil a valuable window into their understanding of the concepts.

Then she organizes the class into small groups to discuss their models and their thinking, while she walks around and listens to their conversations. They do the same thing as a whole class, trying to reach a consensus in understanding the concept. Beausoleil said “you have no idea how much” this has changed what she can learn about her students’ learning.

A Role for States

As the Broken Arrow district works with teachers on strategies like those, Oklahoma leaders are playing a powerful role to shape science instruction statewide. That kind of big-system change is a key concept in the four-year-old ACESSE project. Oklahoma and 12 other states are participating, and they’re sharing ideas with all the other states.

Tiffany Neill, Oklahoma’s executive director of curriculum and instruction, is overseeing several lines of work on equitable science instruction as part of the ACESSE project. She and her team conducted surveys and focus groups to see where Oklahoma teachers most needed support in implementing the state’s science standards.

She coordinates district and regional trainings to help teachers shift to new ways of thinking about instructional and classroom assessment practices. And she has convened key players in the state’ to identify programs or policies that aren’t well aligned to its science standards.

The state replaced its science test to better reflect the phenomenon-centered aims of the standards.

“Instead of questions that ask students to just explain condensation, we now have things like, ‘There’s liquid on the outside of a glass. What causes that to happen?’ ” Neill said.

The project has enabled science leaders to brainstorm across state and district lines. And it’s built dozens of new, free science education resources designed to help teachers with equitable science practices.

One of the leaders of the ACESSE Project, William Penuel of the University of Colorado-Boulder, said that all parts of the K-12 system, from the classroom to state offices, must be involved in building equity into science instruction. Just getting new materials isn’t enough, he said.

Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education research group, applauded the effort to make science relevant for students. But he cautioned that tying lessons exclusively to what children already know can be limiting.

“In moderation, some of this makes sense,” he said. “But the worst thing to do when someone comes from a limited life experience is to just stay inside that box.”

A version of this article appeared in the March 04, 2020 edition of Education Week as The Art of Making Science Equitable

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• 30 May 2024
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Japan’s push to make all research open access is taking shape

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Dalmeet Singh Chawla is a freelance science journalist based in London.

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The Japanese government is pushing ahead with a plan to make Japan’s publicly funded research output free to read. In June, the science ministry will assign funding to universities to build the infrastructure needed to make research papers free to read on a national scale. The move follows the ministry’s announcement in February that researchers who receive government funding will be required to make their papers freely available to read on the institutional repositories from April 2025.

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Correction 03 June 2024 : The original version of this article incorrectly stated the date of the commencement of the open access policy, and incorrectly identified Shimasaki Seiichi's job title. The text has been updated.

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What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S.

More Americans died of gun-related injuries in 2021 than in any other year on record, according to the latest available statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That included record numbers of both gun murders and gun suicides. Despite the increase in such fatalities, the rate of gun deaths – a statistic that accounts for the nation’s growing population – remained below the levels of earlier decades.

Here’s a closer look at gun deaths in the United States, based on a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the CDC, the FBI and other sources. You can also read key public opinion findings about U.S. gun violence and gun policy .

This Pew Research Center analysis examines the changing number and rate of gun deaths in the United States. It is based primarily on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The CDC’s statistics are based on information contained in official death certificates, while the FBI’s figures are based on information voluntarily submitted by thousands of police departments around the country.

For the number and rate of gun deaths over time, we relied on mortality statistics in the CDC’s WONDER database covering four distinct time periods:  1968 to 1978 ,  1979 to 1998 ,  1999 to 2020 , and 2021 . While these statistics are mostly comparable for the full 1968-2021 period, gun murders and suicides between 1968 and 1978 are classified by the CDC as involving firearms  and  explosives; those between 1979 and 2021 are classified as involving firearms only. Similarly, gun deaths involving law enforcement between 1968 and 1978 exclude those caused by “operations of war”; those between 1979 and 2021 include that category, which refers to gun deaths among military personnel or civilians  due to war or civil insurrection in the U.S . All CDC gun death estimates in this analysis are adjusted to account for age differences over time and across states.

The FBI’s statistics about the types of firearms used in gun murders in 2020 come from the bureau’s  Crime Data Explorer website . Specifically, they are drawn from the expanded homicide tables of the agency’s  2020 Crime in the United States report . The FBI’s statistics include murders and non-negligent manslaughters involving firearms.

How many people die from gun-related injuries in the U.S. each year?

In 2021, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC. That figure includes gun murders and gun suicides, along with three less common types of gun-related deaths tracked by the CDC: those that were accidental, those that involved law enforcement and those whose circumstances could not be determined. The total excludes deaths in which gunshot injuries played a contributing, but not principal, role. (CDC fatality statistics are based on information contained in official death certificates, which identify a single cause of death.)

What share of U.S. gun deaths are murders and what share are suicides?

Though they tend to get less public attention than gun-related murders, suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths . In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (26,328), while 43% were murders (20,958), according to the CDC. The remaining gun deaths that year were accidental (549), involved law enforcement (537) or had undetermined circumstances (458).

What share of all murders and suicides in the U.S. involve a gun?

About eight-in-ten U.S. murders in 2021 – 20,958 out of 26,031, or 81% – involved a firearm. That marked the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records. More than half of all suicides in 2021 – 26,328 out of 48,183, or 55% – also involved a gun, the highest percentage since 2001.

How has the number of U.S. gun deaths changed over time?

The record 48,830 total gun deaths in 2021 reflect a 23% increase since 2019, before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic .

Gun murders, in particular, have climbed sharply during the pandemic, increasing 45% between 2019 and 2021, while the number of gun suicides rose 10% during that span.

The overall increase in U.S. gun deaths since the beginning of the pandemic includes an especially stark rise in such fatalities among children and teens under the age of 18. Gun deaths among children and teens rose 50% in just two years , from 1,732 in 2019 to 2,590 in 2021.

How has the rate of U.S. gun deaths changed over time?

While 2021 saw the highest total number of gun deaths in the U.S., this statistic does not take into account the nation’s growing population. On a per capita basis, there were 14.6 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2021 – the highest rate since the early 1990s, but still well below the peak of 16.3 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 1974.

The gun murder rate in the U.S. remains below its peak level despite rising sharply during the pandemic. There were 6.7 gun murders per 100,000 people in 2021, below the 7.2 recorded in 1974.

The gun suicide rate, on the other hand, is now on par with its historical peak. There were 7.5 gun suicides per 100,000 people in 2021, statistically similar to the 7.7 measured in 1977. (One caveat when considering the 1970s figures: In the CDC’s database, gun murders and gun suicides between 1968 and 1978 are classified as those caused by firearms and explosives. In subsequent years, they are classified as deaths involving firearms only.)

Which states have the highest and lowest gun death rates in the U.S.?

The rate of gun fatalities varies widely from state to state. In 2021, the states with the highest total rates of gun-related deaths – counting murders, suicides and all other categories tracked by the CDC – included Mississippi (33.9 per 100,000 people), Louisiana (29.1), New Mexico (27.8), Alabama (26.4) and Wyoming (26.1). The states with the lowest total rates included Massachusetts (3.4), Hawaii (4.8), New Jersey (5.2), New York (5.4) and Rhode Island (5.6).

The results are somewhat different when looking at gun murder and gun suicide rates separately. The places with the highest gun murder rates in 2021 included the District of Columbia (22.3 per 100,000 people), Mississippi (21.2), Louisiana (18.4), Alabama (13.9) and New Mexico (11.7). Those with the lowest gun murder rates included Massachusetts (1.5), Idaho (1.5), Hawaii (1.6), Utah (2.1) and Iowa (2.2). Rate estimates are not available for Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont or Wyoming.

The states with the highest gun suicide rates in 2021 included Wyoming (22.8 per 100,000 people), Montana (21.1), Alaska (19.9), New Mexico (13.9) and Oklahoma (13.7). The states with the lowest gun suicide rates were Massachusetts (1.7), New Jersey (1.9), New York (2.0), Hawaii (2.8) and Connecticut (2.9). Rate estimates are not available for the District of Columbia.

How does the gun death rate in the U.S. compare with other countries?

The gun death rate in the U.S. is much higher than in most other nations, particularly developed nations. But it is still far below the rates in several Latin American countries, according to a 2018 study of 195 countries and territories by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

The U.S. gun death rate was 10.6 per 100,000 people in 2016, the most recent year in the study, which used a somewhat different methodology from the CDC. That was far higher than in countries such as Canada (2.1 per 100,000) and Australia (1.0), as well as European nations such as France (2.7), Germany (0.9) and Spain (0.6). But the rate in the U.S. was much lower than in El Salvador (39.2 per 100,000 people), Venezuela (38.7), Guatemala (32.3), Colombia (25.9) and Honduras (22.5), the study found. Overall, the U.S. ranked 20th in its gun fatality rate that year .

How many people are killed in mass shootings in the U.S. every year?

This is a difficult question to answer because there is no single, agreed-upon definition of the term “mass shooting.” Definitions can vary depending on factors including the number of victims and the circumstances of the shooting.

The FBI collects data on “active shooter incidents,” which it defines as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Using the FBI’s definition, 103 people – excluding the shooters – died in such incidents in 2021 .

The Gun Violence Archive, an online database of gun violence incidents in the U.S., defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are shot, even if no one was killed (again excluding the shooters). Using this definition, 706 people died in these incidents in 2021 .

Regardless of the definition being used, fatalities in mass shooting incidents in the U.S. account for a small fraction of all gun murders that occur nationwide each year.

How has the number of mass shootings in the U.S. changed over time?

The same definitional issue that makes it challenging to calculate mass shooting fatalities comes into play when trying to determine the frequency of U.S. mass shootings over time. The unpredictability of these incidents also complicates matters: As Rand Corp. noted in a research brief , “Chance variability in the annual number of mass shooting incidents makes it challenging to discern a clear trend, and trend estimates will be sensitive to outliers and to the time frame chosen for analysis.”

The FBI found an increase in active shooter incidents between 2000 and 2021. There were three such incidents in 2000. By 2021, that figure had increased to 61.

Which types of firearms are most commonly used in gun murders in the U.S.?

In 2020, the most recent year for which the FBI has published data, handguns were involved in 59% of the 13,620 U.S. gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available. Rifles – the category that includes guns sometimes referred to as “assault weapons” – were involved in 3% of firearm murders. Shotguns were involved in 1%. The remainder of gun homicides and non-negligent manslaughters (36%) involved other kinds of firearms or those classified as “type not stated.”

It’s important to note that the FBI’s statistics do not capture the details on all gun murders in the U.S. each year. The FBI’s data is based on information voluntarily submitted by police departments around the country, and not all agencies participate or provide complete information each year.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published on Aug. 16, 2019.

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Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

Mar 16, 2023 | Jared Spataro - CVP, AI at Work

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Humans are hard-wired to dream, to create, to innovate. Each of us seeks to do work that gives us purpose — to write a great novel, to make a discovery, to build strong communities, to care for the sick. The urge to connect to the core of our work lives in all of us. But today, we spend too much time consumed by the drudgery of work on tasks that zap our time, creativity and energy. To reconnect to the soul of our work, we don’t just need a better way of doing the same things. We need a whole new way to work.

Today, we are bringing the power of next-generation AI to work. Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot — your copilot for work . It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet.

“Today marks the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing, which will fundamentally change the way we work and unlock a new wave of productivity growth,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “With our new copilot for work, we’re giving people more agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface — natural language.”

Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more — to unleash creativity, unlock productivity and uplevel skills. Today we’re also announcing an entirely new experience: Business Chat . Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads.

With Copilot, you’re always in control. You decide what to keep, modify or discard. Now, you can be more creative in Word, more analytical in Excel, more expressive in PowerPoint, more productive in Outlook and more collaborative in Teams.

Microsoft 365 Copilot transforms work in three ways:

Unleash creativity. With Copilot in Word, you can jump-start the creative process so you never start with a blank slate again. Copilot gives you a first draft to edit and iterate on — saving hours in writing, sourcing, and editing time. Sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong — but it will always put you further ahead. You’re always in control as the author, driving your unique ideas forward, prompting Copilot to shorten, rewrite or give feedback. Copilot in PowerPoint helps you create beautiful presentations with a simple prompt, adding relevant content from a document you made last week or last year. And with Copilot in Excel, you can analyze trends and create professional-looking data visualizations in seconds.

Unlock productivity. We all want to focus on the 20% of our work that really matters, but 80% of our time is consumed with busywork that bogs us down. Copilot lightens the load. From summarizing long email threads to quickly drafting suggested replies, Copilot in Outlook helps you clear your inbox in minutes, not hours. And every meeting is a productive meeting with Copilot in Teams. It can summarize key discussion points — including who said what and where people are aligned and where they disagree — and suggest action items, all in real time during a meeting. And with Copilot in Power Platform, anyone can automate repetitive tasks, create chatbots and go from idea to working app in minutes.

GitHub data shows that Copilot promises to unlock productivity for everyone. Among developers who use GitHub Copilot, 88% say they are more productive, 74% say that they can focus on more satisfying work, and 77% say it helps them spend less time searching for information or examples.

But Copilot doesn’t just supercharge individual productivity. It creates a new knowledge model for every organization — harnessing the massive reservoir of data and insights that lies largely inaccessible and untapped today. Business Chat works across all your business data and apps to surface the information and insights you need from a sea of data — so knowledge flows freely across the organization, saving you valuable time searching for answers. You will be able to access Business Chat from Microsoft 365.com, from Bing when you’re signed in with your work account, or from Teams.

Uplevel skills. Copilot makes you better at what you’re good at and lets you quickly master what you’ve yet to learn. The average person uses only a handful of commands — such as “animate a slide” or “insert a table” — from the thousands available across Microsoft 365. Now, all that rich functionality is unlocked using just natural language. And this is only the beginning.

Copilot will fundamentally change how people work with AI and how AI works with people. As with any new pattern of work, there’s a learning curve — but those who embrace this new way of working will quickly gain an edge.

The Copilot System: Enterprise-ready AI

Microsoft is uniquely positioned to deliver enterprise-ready AI with the Copilot System . Copilot is more than OpenAI’s ChatGPT embedded into Microsoft 365. It’s a sophisticated processing and orchestration engine working behind the scenes to combine the power of LLMs, including GPT-4, with the Microsoft 365 apps and your business data in the Microsoft Graph — now accessible to everyone through natural language.

Grounded in your business data. AI-powered LLMs are trained on a large but limited corpus of data. The key to unlocking productivity in business lies in connecting LLMs to your business data — in a secure, compliant, privacy-preserving way. Microsoft 365 Copilot has real-time access to both your content and context in the Microsoft Graph. This means it generates answers anchored in your business content — your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings, contacts and other business data — and combines them with your working context — the meeting you’re in now, the email exchanges you’ve had on a topic, the chat conversations you had last week — to deliver accurate, relevant, contextual responses.

Built on Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security, compliance and privacy. Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 and automatically inherits all your company’s valuable security, compliance, and privacy policies and processes. Two-factor authentication, compliance boundaries, privacy protections, and more make Copilot the AI solution you can trust.

Architected to protect tenant, group and individual data. We know data leakage is a concern for customers. Copilot LLMs are not trained on your tenant data or your prompts. Within your tenant, our time-tested permissioning model ensures that data won’t leak across user groups. And on an individual level, Copilot presents only data you can access using the same technology that we’ve been using for years to secure customer data.

Integrated into the apps millions use every day. Microsoft 365 Copilot is integrated in the productivity apps millions of people use and rely on every day for work and life — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more. An intuitive and consistent user experience ensures it looks, feels and behaves the same way in Teams as it does in Outlook, with a shared design language for prompts, refinements and commands.

Designed to learn new skills.  Microsoft 365 Copilot’s foundational skills are a game changer for productivity: It can already create, summarize, analyze, collaborate and automate using your specific business content and context. But it doesn’t stop there. Copilot knows how to command apps (e.g., “animate this slide”) and work across apps, translating a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation. And Copilot is designed to learn new skills. For example, with Viva Sales, Copilot can learn how to connect to CRM systems of record to pull customer data — like interaction and order histories — into communications. As Copilot learns about new domains and processes, it will be able to perform even more sophisticated tasks and queries.

Committed to building responsibly

At Microsoft, we are guided by our AI principles and Responsible AI Standard and decades of research on AI, grounding and privacy-preserving machine learning. A multidisciplinary team of researchers, engineers and policy experts reviews our AI systems for potential harms and mitigations — refining training data, filtering to limit harmful content, query- and result-blocking sensitive topics, and applying Microsoft technologies like InterpretML and Fairlearn to help detect and correct data bias. We make it clear how the system makes decisions by noting limitations, linking to sources, and prompting users to review, fact-check and adjust content based on subject-matter expertise.

Moving boldly as we learn  

In the months ahead, we’re bringing Copilot to all our productivity apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Viva, Power Platform, and more. We’ll share more on pricing and licensing soon. Earlier this month we announced Dynamics 365 Copilot as the world’s first AI Copilot in both CRM and ERP to bring the next-generation AI to every line of business.

Everyone deserves to find purpose and meaning in their work — and Microsoft 365 Copilot can help. To serve the unmet needs of our customers, we must move quickly and responsibly, learning as we go. We’re testing Copilot with a small group of customers to get feedback and improve our models as we scale, and we will expand to more soon.

Learn more on the Microsoft 365 blog and visit WorkLab to get expert insights on how AI will create a brighter future of work for everyone.

And for all the blogs, videos and assets related to today’s announcements, please visit our microsite .

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The state of AI in 2023: Generative AI’s breakout year

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The latest annual McKinsey Global Survey  on the current state of AI confirms the explosive growth of generative AI (gen AI) tools . Less than a year after many of these tools debuted, one-third of our survey respondents say their organizations are using gen AI regularly in at least one business function. Amid recent advances, AI has risen from a topic relegated to tech employees to a focus of company leaders: nearly one-quarter of surveyed C-suite executives say they are personally using gen AI tools for work, and more than one-quarter of respondents from companies using AI say gen AI is already on their boards’ agendas. What’s more, 40 percent of respondents say their organizations will increase their investment in AI overall because of advances in gen AI. The findings show that these are still early days for managing gen AI–related risks, with less than half of respondents saying their organizations are mitigating even the risk they consider most relevant: inaccuracy.

The organizations that have already embedded AI capabilities have been the first to explore gen AI’s potential, and those seeing the most value from more traditional AI capabilities—a group we call AI high performers—are already outpacing others in their adoption of gen AI tools. 1 We define AI high performers as organizations that, according to respondents, attribute at least 20 percent of their EBIT to AI adoption.

The expected business disruption from gen AI is significant, and respondents predict meaningful changes to their workforces. They anticipate workforce cuts in certain areas and large reskilling efforts to address shifting talent needs. Yet while the use of gen AI might spur the adoption of other AI tools, we see few meaningful increases in organizations’ adoption of these technologies. The percent of organizations adopting any AI tools has held steady since 2022, and adoption remains concentrated within a small number of business functions.

Table of Contents

• It’s early days still, but use of gen AI is already widespread
• Leading companies are already ahead with gen AI
• AI-related talent needs shift, and AI’s workforce effects are expected to be substantial
• With all eyes on gen AI, AI adoption and impact remain steady

About the research

1. it’s early days still, but use of gen ai is already widespread.

The findings from the survey—which was in the field in mid-April 2023—show that, despite gen AI’s nascent public availability, experimentation with the tools  is already relatively common, and respondents expect the new capabilities to transform their industries. Gen AI has captured interest across the business population: individuals across regions, industries, and seniority levels are using gen AI for work and outside of work. Seventy-nine percent of all respondents say they’ve had at least some exposure to gen AI, either for work or outside of work, and 22 percent say they are regularly using it in their own work. While reported use is quite similar across seniority levels, it is highest among respondents working in the technology sector and those in North America.

Organizations, too, are now commonly using gen AI. One-third of all respondents say their organizations are already regularly using generative AI in at least one function—meaning that 60 percent of organizations with reported AI adoption are using gen AI. What’s more, 40 percent of those reporting AI adoption at their organizations say their companies expect to invest more in AI overall thanks to generative AI, and 28 percent say generative AI use is already on their board’s agenda. The most commonly reported business functions using these newer tools are the same as those in which AI use is most common overall: marketing and sales, product and service development, and service operations, such as customer care and back-office support. This suggests that organizations are pursuing these new tools where the most value is. In our previous research , these three areas, along with software engineering, showed the potential to deliver about 75 percent of the total annual value from generative AI use cases.

In these early days, expectations for gen AI’s impact are high : three-quarters of all respondents expect gen AI to cause significant or disruptive change in the nature of their industry’s competition in the next three years. Survey respondents working in the technology and financial-services industries are the most likely to expect disruptive change from gen AI. Our previous research shows  that, while all industries are indeed likely to see some degree of disruption, the level of impact is likely to vary. 2 “ The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier ,” McKinsey, June 14, 2023. Industries relying most heavily on knowledge work are likely to see more disruption—and potentially reap more value. While our estimates suggest that tech companies, unsurprisingly, are poised to see the highest impact from gen AI—adding value equivalent to as much as 9 percent of global industry revenue—knowledge-based industries such as banking (up to 5 percent), pharmaceuticals and medical products (also up to 5 percent), and education (up to 4 percent) could experience significant effects as well. By contrast, manufacturing-based industries, such as aerospace, automotives, and advanced electronics, could experience less disruptive effects. This stands in contrast to the impact of previous technology waves that affected manufacturing the most and is due to gen AI’s strengths in language-based activities, as opposed to those requiring physical labor.

Responses show many organizations not yet addressing potential risks from gen AI

According to the survey, few companies seem fully prepared for the widespread use of gen AI—or the business risks these tools may bring. Just 21 percent of respondents reporting AI adoption say their organizations have established policies governing employees’ use of gen AI technologies in their work. And when we asked specifically about the risks of adopting gen AI, few respondents say their companies are mitigating the most commonly cited risk with gen AI: inaccuracy. Respondents cite inaccuracy more frequently than both cybersecurity and regulatory compliance, which were the most common risks from AI overall in previous surveys. Just 32 percent say they’re mitigating inaccuracy, a smaller percentage than the 38 percent who say they mitigate cybersecurity risks. Interestingly, this figure is significantly lower than the percentage of respondents who reported mitigating AI-related cybersecurity last year (51 percent). Overall, much as we’ve seen in previous years, most respondents say their organizations are not addressing AI-related risks.

2. Leading companies are already ahead with gen AI

The survey results show that AI high performers—that is, organizations where respondents say at least 20 percent of EBIT in 2022 was attributable to AI use—are going all in on artificial intelligence, both with gen AI and more traditional AI capabilities. These organizations that achieve significant value from AI are already using gen AI in more business functions than other organizations do, especially in product and service development and risk and supply chain management. When looking at all AI capabilities—including more traditional machine learning capabilities, robotic process automation, and chatbots—AI high performers also are much more likely than others to use AI in product and service development, for uses such as product-development-cycle optimization, adding new features to existing products, and creating new AI-based products. These organizations also are using AI more often than other organizations in risk modeling and for uses within HR such as performance management and organization design and workforce deployment optimization.

AI high performers are much more likely than others to use AI in product and service development.

Another difference from their peers: high performers’ gen AI efforts are less oriented toward cost reduction, which is a top priority at other organizations. Respondents from AI high performers are twice as likely as others to say their organizations’ top objective for gen AI is to create entirely new businesses or sources of revenue—and they’re most likely to cite the increase in the value of existing offerings through new AI-based features.

As we’ve seen in previous years , these high-performing organizations invest much more than others in AI: respondents from AI high performers are more than five times more likely than others to say they spend more than 20 percent of their digital budgets on AI. They also use AI capabilities more broadly throughout the organization. Respondents from high performers are much more likely than others to say that their organizations have adopted AI in four or more business functions and that they have embedded a higher number of AI capabilities. For example, respondents from high performers more often report embedding knowledge graphs in at least one product or business function process, in addition to gen AI and related natural-language capabilities.

While AI high performers are not immune to the challenges of capturing value from AI, the results suggest that the difficulties they face reflect their relative AI maturity, while others struggle with the more foundational, strategic elements of AI adoption. Respondents at AI high performers most often point to models and tools, such as monitoring model performance in production and retraining models as needed over time, as their top challenge. By comparison, other respondents cite strategy issues, such as setting a clearly defined AI vision that is linked with business value or finding sufficient resources.

The findings offer further evidence that even high performers haven’t mastered best practices regarding AI adoption, such as machine-learning-operations (MLOps) approaches, though they are much more likely than others to do so. For example, just 35 percent of respondents at AI high performers report that where possible, their organizations assemble existing components, rather than reinvent them, but that’s a much larger share than the 19 percent of respondents from other organizations who report that practice.

Many specialized MLOps technologies and practices  may be needed to adopt some of the more transformative uses cases that gen AI applications can deliver—and do so as safely as possible. Live-model operations is one such area, where monitoring systems and setting up instant alerts to enable rapid issue resolution can keep gen AI systems in check. High performers stand out in this respect but have room to grow: one-quarter of respondents from these organizations say their entire system is monitored and equipped with instant alerts, compared with just 12 percent of other respondents.

3. AI-related talent needs shift, and AI’s workforce effects are expected to be substantial

Our latest survey results show changes in the roles that organizations are filling to support their AI ambitions. In the past year, organizations using AI most often hired data engineers, machine learning engineers, and Al data scientists—all roles that respondents commonly reported hiring in the previous survey. But a much smaller share of respondents report hiring AI-related-software engineers—the most-hired role last year—than in the previous survey (28 percent in the latest survey, down from 39 percent). Roles in prompt engineering have recently emerged, as the need for that skill set rises alongside gen AI adoption, with 7 percent of respondents whose organizations have adopted AI reporting those hires in the past year.

The findings suggest that hiring for AI-related roles remains a challenge but has become somewhat easier over the past year, which could reflect the spate of layoffs at technology companies from late 2022 through the first half of 2023. Smaller shares of respondents than in the previous survey report difficulty hiring for roles such as AI data scientists, data engineers, and data-visualization specialists, though responses suggest that hiring machine learning engineers and AI product owners remains as much of a challenge as in the previous year.

Looking ahead to the next three years, respondents predict that the adoption of AI will reshape many roles in the workforce. Generally, they expect more employees to be reskilled than to be separated. Nearly four in ten respondents reporting AI adoption expect more than 20 percent of their companies’ workforces will be reskilled, whereas 8 percent of respondents say the size of their workforces will decrease by more than 20 percent.

Looking specifically at gen AI’s predicted impact, service operations is the only function in which most respondents expect to see a decrease in workforce size at their organizations. This finding generally aligns with what our recent research  suggests: while the emergence of gen AI increased our estimate of the percentage of worker activities that could be automated (60 to 70 percent, up from 50 percent), this doesn’t necessarily translate into the automation of an entire role.

AI high performers are expected to conduct much higher levels of reskilling than other companies are. Respondents at these organizations are over three times more likely than others to say their organizations will reskill more than 30 percent of their workforces over the next three years as a result of AI adoption.

4. With all eyes on gen AI, AI adoption and impact remain steady

While the use of gen AI tools is spreading rapidly, the survey data doesn’t show that these newer tools are propelling organizations’ overall AI adoption. The share of organizations that have adopted AI overall remains steady, at least for the moment, with 55 percent of respondents reporting that their organizations have adopted AI. Less than a third of respondents continue to say that their organizations have adopted AI in more than one business function, suggesting that AI use remains limited in scope. Product and service development and service operations continue to be the two business functions in which respondents most often report AI adoption, as was true in the previous four surveys. And overall, just 23 percent of respondents say at least 5 percent of their organizations’ EBIT last year was attributable to their use of AI—essentially flat with the previous survey—suggesting there is much more room to capture value.

Organizations continue to see returns in the business areas in which they are using AI, and they plan to increase investment in the years ahead. We see a majority of respondents reporting AI-related revenue increases within each business function using AI. And looking ahead, more than two-thirds expect their organizations to increase their AI investment over the next three years.

The online survey was in the field April 11 to 21, 2023, and garnered responses from 1,684 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. Of those respondents, 913 said their organizations had adopted AI in at least one function and were asked questions about their organizations’ AI use. To adjust for differences in response rates, the data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent’s nation to global GDP.

The survey content and analysis were developed by Michael Chui , a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute and a partner in McKinsey’s Bay Area office, where Lareina Yee is a senior partner; Bryce Hall , an associate partner in the Washington, DC, office; and senior partners Alex Singla and Alexander Sukharevsky , global leaders of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, based in the Chicago and London offices, respectively.

They wish to thank Shivani Gupta, Abhisek Jena, Begum Ortaoglu, Barr Seitz, and Li Zhang for their contributions to this work.

This article was edited by Heather Hanselman, an editor in the Atlanta office.

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