Not only should publicly-funded research results be freely available, but the researchers or someone actually decent at writing should be required to write up the paper in a form that a normally-intelligent high school graduate could understand the majority of.

No, this isn’t easy. I’ve done this sort of task before. And some things can’t be simplified and retain any semblance of rectitude. In reality, though, most things can be distilled a great deal without losing much accuracy at all. In my experience, something like 60%+ of jargon is intra-domain signaling and not that useful even to the practitioners.

I’m fairly intelligent, by most accounts. And it takes me several hours to read a 50-page paper and truly understand it — and that’s in fields I know something about. In fields I do not, it could be days.

I just don’t have time to read all the things I’d like to, and the average person simply won’t read anything at all in the format in which most papers are presented.

This won’t increase greatly the rate at which papers are read by laypeople. I’m under no illusions here. It will, though, likely make journalistic synopses more accurate and it will make it easier for people like me to read papers who just don’t have time to devote to it as more than a small part-time pursuit.

I know: there is no funding for this and there is not likely to be. But as a semi-utopian vision, it is a good one.