Amy Harmon, New York Times, on Open Access publishing

Amy Harmon, who writes for the New York Times and has written some excellent recent pieces on evolution and genomics is answering some questions on the New York Times website. 

And one of them was about communicating science and Amy responded (with other comments):

Of course, the one way scientists do, theoretically, communicate with the public is by publishing their results. Since these papers are written for other scientists, they can be hard to understand. But even for people game to wade through them, they are often hard to obtain. The two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, and many others, require people to pay for access to papers whose authors have been financed by taxpayers. “Open access” publishers like the Public Library of Science do not, so it would be nice to see scientists choosing — or being required — to publish in journals that are open to the public.

Nothing more for me to add.