> Imagine how much better science reporting would be if every popular science article was expected to link directly to the full papers they were referencing. I

> Imagine how much better science reporting would be if every popular science article was expected to link directly to the full papers they were referencing. I agree, but for the most part newspapers aren't even getting the "referencing" part right. That is, they just lazily write "a new study" instead of providing an actual, useful reference to the primary source. I don't think this would magically change with open access: Even for non-open works there would usually already be the possibility to link to a public abstract, but most science reporting simply does not care enough.