The general public tends to avoid reliable sources such as scientific literature due to their complex language and lacking background knowledge. Instead, they rely on shallow and derived sources on the web and in social media – often published for commercial or political incentives, rather than informational value.  Can text simplification help to remove some of these access barriers? In this talk, I will present the CLEF 2023 SimpleText track tackling technical and evaluation challenges of scientific information access for a general audience.  We provide appropriate reusable data and benchmarks for scientific text simplification and promote novel research to reduce barriers to understanding complex texts.  Our overall use case is to create a simplified summary of multiple scientific documents based on a popular science query which provides a user with an accessible overview of this specific topic.