> There's no way the "91% more time to read papers" figure applies equally to the median Chinese and median Indian scientist.
I'm also kind of shocked at the idea that language barriers cause greater barriers to reading a paper (91% time increase) than to writing one (51%) in a non-native language.
> That said, this article and paper don't really seem to provide any kind of solution, they just identify a problem. I don't really see what the scientific community can do about it?
Guessing at the authors' motivations—for me, although it's obvious in retrospect, if you had asked me yesterday "what are some barriers to non-native speakers of English entering the sciences?", I wouldn't necessarily have thought of the extra time to read and write papers, and just this spreading of awareness is a reasonable end in itself.
Beyond that, I think part of the point is to de-externalize the cost. Currently, native English speakers bear, or at least know that they are bearing, little to none of the cost of the difficulty others have accessing their work, and I think the hope is to force people to think consciously about what they could do. For example, in math, at least, there are journals and series that publish translations of non-English works into English, but I know of few that work the other way; that could be a major good, even if it is a daunting undertaking. If that's too much—as it surely is as an immediate solution—one thing that occurs to me is that perhaps there could be some sort of training for scientific writers in how to write more accessible English—where jargon is OK (since it's to be read by specialists), but "advanced" English constructs should be avoided when possible. tetris11 mentions elsethread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36787311) that Nature apparently does something like this.