ArticleScientific reports2025
A comprehensive evaluation of life sciences data resources reveals significant accessibility barriers.
Article in Scientific reports, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ten simple rules for making biomedical data resources accessible.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- AltGosling: automatic generation of text descriptions for accessible genomics data visualization.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Individuals with disabilities participate notably less in the scientific workforce. While the reasons for this discrepancy are multifaceted, accessibility of knowledge is likely a factor. In the life sciences, digital resources play an important role in gaining new knowledge and conducting data-driven research. However, there is little data on how accessible essential life sciences resources are for people with disabilities. Our work is the first to comprehensively evaluate the accessibility of life sciences resources. To understand the current state of accessibility of digital data resources in the life sciences, we pose three research questions: (1) What are the most common accessibility issues?; (2) What factors may have contributed to the current state of accessibility?; and (3) What is the potential impact of accessibility issues in real-world use cases? To answer these questions, we collected large-scale accessibility data about two essential resources: data portals (n = 3,112) and journal websites (n = 5,099). Our analysis shows that many life sciences resources contain severe accessibility issues (74.8% of data portals and 69.1% of journal websites) and are significantly less accessible than US government websites, which we used as a baseline. Focusing on visual impairment, we further conducted a preliminary study to evaluate three data portals in-depth with a blind user, unveiling the practical impact of the identified accessibility issues on common tasks (53.3% success rate), such as data discovery tasks. Based on our results, we find that simply implementing accessibility standards does not guarantee real-world accessibility of life sciences data resources. We believe that our data and analysis results bring insights into how the scientific community can address critical accessibility barriers and increase awareness of accessibility, leading to more inclusive life sciences research and education. Our analysis results are publicly available at http://inscidar.org/ .
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.