The Paradox of Open Access Knowledge
How Academic Systems Reclaimed What Was Meant to Be Shared
by Dr. Anna Neya Kazanskaia | NEYA Global
An essay on how openness drifts into prestige cycles—and how Ethical Access and living standards return knowledge to practice
When “Open” Became a Wall
The NEYA Global Non-Profit Library began with a simple idea: to return knowledge to the movement. Research should belong to those who act — educators, volunteers, coordinators, and small organizations working to create change in real conditions.
From the beginning, our goal was to put knowledge back in the hands of those who create change. Openness meant giving research to educators, volunteers, and organizations who use it in real-world conditions. Yet over time, the library shifted: academics began to extract, cite, and analyze, cycling knowledge back into scholarly prestige. What was designed to support direct practice risked becoming academic capital, moving away from its intended purpose.
This pattern is not about the failure of generosity; it reflects the way institutions are built. In many disciplines, similar loops emerge. In public health, for example, open data often remains locked in repositories, inaccessible to those who work directly with communities (Smith et al., 2018). Without translation into practical formats, openness becomes immobility.
The same pattern appears in social innovation. Practitioners access hundreds of reports yet lack paths connecting insight to action. They need not more documents but frameworks, examples, and workflows that help them act. Structured for use, knowledge regains motion.
In the non-profit sector, this movement is vital. When knowledge stalls, impact stalls. A useful idea can reshape a project if it reaches the right person at the right moment. Keeping knowledge alive means letting it move — across roles, borders, and languages — back to practice.
The New Appropriation: When Academia Colonized Openness
Open access was introduced to empower everyone with knowledge, hoping that ideas would circulate freely and support practice on the ground. As academic systems co-opted the language of openness, however, it became another means to gain prestige, shifting the benefit from practitioners to institutions.
Ideas created within communities — toolkits, frameworks, and field-tested reports — began to reappear in academic papers with new authorship and new prestige. Recognition moved upward, while the people whose experience made those ideas possible were left unnamed.
This dynamic defines the current global knowledge economy. Universities and journals continue to expand through the vocabulary of openness, presenting inclusion while maintaining vertical benefit. The form of access grows, yet the direction of advantage stays the same.
In global health, the phenomenon is known as parachute science: research drawn from local realities that rarely returns to them (Odeny et al., 2022). Insights travel one way — from the field to the center — and stay there.
Digital spaces mirror this process. A community manual becomes a university case study, which is then enclosed behind another paywall. Legitimacy accumulates, but value for practitioners disappears. This is not only an ethical concern; it is a structural limitation. Knowledge that cannot return to its source cannot evolve.
To restore balance, openness must be measured by reciprocity: not just by how widely knowledge spreads, but by how effectively it reconnects with those who act upon it. Insight should return to its source, enriched with feedback, making the knowledge cycle complete.
The Real Loss: Practitioners Left Outside Again
Teachers, social workers, and local NGO teams still open journals searching for guidance and find theory instead. They appear in the literature, but rarely in the design of solutions. The distance between research and daily work remains.
This distance is not about access alone; it is about translation. The key takeaway: Access without usability excludes people from the knowledge system. Reports must connect clearly to real practice, or they remain silent.
Language deepens this silence. The dominance of English limits participation for entire regions of practice (Arenas-Castro et al., 2024). A coordinator in Senegal or a teacher in rural Latin America may find the document but not understand its meaning. True inclusion depends on comprehension, not just access.
When practitioners cannot interact with research, learning becomes one-sided. Innovation fades because data and experience stop meeting. The lived intelligence of daily work — the adjustments, improvisations, and insights born in real conditions — disappears from record.
To serve its purpose openly, it must lead back to the field. Translation and adaptation are not secondary steps; they are the continuation of research itself. Each time an idea is rewritten in the local language or turned into a tool, it regains its life.
The Missing Architecture: Visibility Without Usability
Information by itself does not create progress. Reports, datasets, and repositories only gain meaning when they are part of a system that links them to decisions and action. Without that architecture, knowledge stays suspended.
Usability gives openness its depth. The main takeaway: Clarity, structure, and relevance are crucial. If the user can understand and act on the data, openness has succeeded.
The GovLab has shown that open datasets deliver results only when intermediaries connect them to specific use-cases. Without those bridges, information remains visible but inert.
The pattern repeats across sectors. NGOs publish dashboards of data that their teams cannot interpret. Governments release datasets without training people to apply them. Universities digitize research without adjusting to low-connectivity realities. Infrastructure grows, yet the pathways of use remain narrow.
Openness becomes real when systems are built for interaction. Architecture transforms information into experience. When frameworks link discovery to practice, knowledge regains its function and its movement.
The Real Question: Who Does This Knowledge Help?
Every framework prompts a crucial main question: Who does it help?
Does it help the institutions that fund research, or the people who carry its outcomes into the field? Does it strengthen those who manage systems, or those who build them with limited tools and abundant need?
Years in practice teach what usable knowledge feels like. It travels easily, adapts to context, and produces immediate change. It informs the next decision, the next training, the next act of care. Much of what we call knowledge never reaches this stage. It remains within academic or institutional boundaries, precise but disconnected.
Knowledge achieves purpose when its benefits return to its origin. When it supports those whose experience shaped it, knowledge fulfills its mission. When it circulates disconnected from practice, it loses real-world value.
Imbalances remain even in open access. Research concerning low- and middle-income countries continues to be authored primarily from elsewhere (Nafade et al., 2019). Access expands, but ownership stands still.
Real collaboration begins when the people whose realities inform research also define how it is applied. When that occurs, knowledge becomes relational again — guided by trust, respect, and shared intention.
Returning to Ethical Access
Openness and accessibility are related, yet they require different forms of care. A text can be visible to everyone and still disconnected from those who need it most. Accessibility grows through relationships — through the willingness to share knowledge with awareness of context and purpose.
To preserve that purpose, I began shaping a model of Ethical Access. In this model, materials are shared through direct request, with educators, coordinators, and practitioners who build and implement. This approach protects meaning. It facilitates the exchange of humans and allows dialogue to accompany distribution.
Ethical Access restores the intention of sharing. Key takeaway: Responsible knowledge sharing serves a clear purpose and sustains communities.
The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance describe a similar ethic: data should be managed with purpose, consent, and accountability (Carroll et al., 2020). Ethical sharing strengthens equity because it values connection over volume. It replaces the act of release with the act of relationship.
To return to ethical access is to return to the origin of knowledge — to creation as service, exchange, and participation. It is a movement that keeps knowledge responsive to those who move the world forward.
The Future: Living Knowledge
The future of knowledge depends on its ability to remain alive. Key takeaway: Systems must enable ongoing use, feedback, and evolution with practitioners for relevance and impact.
Knowledge shows its value through transformation — when a framework improves a project, when a concept strengthens collaboration, when a document becomes part of everyday practice. The link between understanding and application is what sustains impact.
In humanitarian response, this principle has long been visible. The Sphere Handbook continues to function effectively because it grows through experience. Practitioners test it, adapt it, and send their lessons back to the editors. The result is a living reference that stays relevant through participation.
Let us each take responsibility for keeping knowledge alive and accessible. Reach out, share what you learn, and invite feedback from those who put knowledge into practice. Together, ensure that the flow of insight does not end with access but continues through real-world application and adaptation. Join in cultivating living knowledge that returns to and empowers those at the heart of change.
Knowledge ecosystems of the future will depend on this continuity. The task is to design systems that allow ideas to evolve naturally through dialogue, translation, and shared practice. Knowledge remains alive when it continues its journey back to the hands that use it.
References
Arenas-Castro, S., Guevara, C., & Espinosa, C. (2024). Language barriers in global science: Why open access is not enough. PLOS Global Public Health.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10932714
Carroll, S. R., Garba, I., Figueroa-Rodríguez, O. L., Holbrook, J., Lovett, R., Materechera, S., Parsons, M., Raseroka, K., Rodriguez-Lonebear, D., Rowe, R., Sara, R., Walker, J. D., Anderson, J., & Hudson, M. (2020). The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Data Science Journal, 19(1), 43.
https://datascience.codata.org/articles/10.5334/dsj-2020-043
Nafade, V., Sen, P., & Pai, M. (2019). Global health journals need to address equity, diversity and inclusion. BMJ Global Health, 4(5), e002018.
https://gh.bmj.com/content/4/5/e002018
Odeny, T. A., Kasonde, J. M., & Boulle, A. (2022). Moving beyond “parachute science” in global health research. BMJ Global Health, 7(8), e009482.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9488789
Smith, K. E., Katikireddi, S. V., & Ellis, S. (2018). The “research-to-practice” gap in health systems: Understanding barriers to evidence use. Health Research Policy and Systems, 16(1), 70.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6051530
The GovLab. (2017). Open Data’s Impact: Key Findings from 19 Case Studies. New York University, The Governance Lab.
https://thegovlab.org/static/files/publications/open-data-impact-key-findings.pdf
The Sphere Association. (2023). The Sphere Handbook: Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response. Geneva: Sphere Association.
https://spherestandards.org
Continuing the Conversation
The NEYA Global Non-Profit Library is open to educators, coordinators, and practitioners who work to strengthen communities in real conditions. Each resource is created for applied use and shared through Ethical Access — ensuring that knowledge remains connected to its purpose and context.
If you are a practitioner, educator, or organization seeking practical materials, you are welcome to explore the Library or request access to specific works.
If you cannot locate a publication, please reach out directly — each request helps the Library grow through dialogue and shared intent.
Together, these platforms form a living system of knowledge — continuously evolving through the people who use it.
Author Note
Dr. Anna Neya Kazanskaia is the founder of NEYA Global Publishing and the NEYA Global Non-Profit Library, an open-access ecosystem designed for practical application in low-resource environments. She developed the Library as a living framework that connects research, teaching, and field implementation, offering direct guidance to educators, coordinators, and social innovators.
With more than 1,700 registered papers, books, and teaching materials, her work represents one of the most comprehensive collections of applied non-profit knowledge globally.
