Could the increased unaccessiblity of the scientific literature be partly responsible for the distrust of the general public for scientists and scientific theories?
A lot of the intelligent people I know who distrust scientists became that way after seeing repeated patterns of poor science and incomplete knowledge being held up as absolute truth, and that "absolute truth" being used as a weapon to bludgeon dissenters.
The most familiar example is nutritional science, and the whole fat vs carbs debate. There are a lot of easy examples in medical science and economics as well. The scary thing is the more scientific articles you read the more you see this pattern everywhere. Scientists have greatly oversold the degree of their knowledge in most fields.
That seems unlikely, the general public doesn't read studies. Their knowledge about studies generally comes from articles written about those studies. Sadly those articles are often sensationalized pieces like "Scientists have harvested cells from jellyfish that could allow us to become immortal" and the likes.
I find it far more likely that the mistrust comes from those articles combined with the fake experts that appear on TV. This is less of an issue in Europe, but it does happen here as well.
Maybe both have the same cause, the need to publish important(-looking) results, or perish? Being scientifically rigorous may take a back seat: unimpressive papers are hard or impossible to publish.
Structurally it's similar to clickbait. I heard that such an incentive structure did bad things to journalism.
Perhaps. Or maybe they're both symptoms of the same root problem: a glut of "scientists" who care less about truth and more about money/academic career. BUT, we shouldn't view these scientists like Disney villains. They're often victims too: it's not their fault they didn't realize the dire circumstances of the modern academic scientist. In a way, they're trapped in a vicious feedback loop: dismal funding forces them to fight dirty to put food on the table, which results in junk science, which results in public distrust, which results in even less funding...
