So here's the experience driving that observation: I'm adjacent to a number of anti-vax communities and during the pandemic (and before) there were PDFs of "1000 papers showing why vaccines are dangerous" being passed around. Honestly, snake oil salesmen don't even have to go through pay to play, they can just self publish and the effect is the same. If it looks real enough, a lot of people don't have the background to tell the difference. They look at the abstract and the conclusions and go from there.
If we're going to beat that kind of misinformation, the real stuff needs to be open and available so that translators can help people understand it. There were people in academia doing this on social media during the pandemic, but we need many, many more of them. There are a lot of people outside of academia who have enough of a background that they could help - if only they had access.
Edit to add: Also, I've heard from some folks in academia that they've been bitten by open access journals that started out well intentioned and turned into pay to play with bad reputations. And that in some fields, it is hard to track which ones are good and which ones are going bad.
Yes, but the point of publishing is not to inform the public or media - the point is to communicate scientific results to others working in one's field.
Expecting it to be well explained to the general public is like asking all patches posted to LKML to include a lay-language explanation of exactly what the patch changes, without using specialized CS terms.
If we're going to beat that kind of misinformation, the real stuff needs to be open and available so that translators can help people understand it. There were people in academia doing this on social media during the pandemic, but we need many, many more of them. There are a lot of people outside of academia who have enough of a background that they could help - if only they had access.
Edit to add: Also, I've heard from some folks in academia that they've been bitten by open access journals that started out well intentioned and turned into pay to play with bad reputations. And that in some fields, it is hard to track which ones are good and which ones are going bad.