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Background In the digital environment, users' academic reading behaviour has changed, working with many articles simultaneously to search, filter, scan, link, annotate and analyse content fragments. The semantic enhancement environment has been widely set with semantic technologies to offer additional and handy support for users and thus facilitate the reading process. Despite many efforts devoted to developing a semantic enhancement environment, less attention has been paid to its actual effects. Objectives This study aims to explore the effects of a semantic enhancement environment. Methods Elaborating on cognitive load theory and focusing on academic reading, this study compared users' cognitive load and reading effect under the semantic enhancement environment and plain text environment and verified the three hypotheses. Results and conclusions Through experiments and statistical analysis, this study found that, under a semantic enhancement environment, users had their cognitive load reduced and their reading effect improved. Consequently, a semantic enhancement environment promotes academic reading. Takeaways This study adds to previous literature on semantic publishing by empirically corroborating the conducive effects of semantic enhancement environment in academic reading. Additionally, it justifies semantic publishing and provides a reference for the future design of semantically enhanced reading environments.