A process problem: What the NDIS reform and Open Access have in common

Australia has two critical ‘access’ conversations happening in spaces that rarely talk to each other, yet they’re sharing a problem.

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) overhaul is dominating headlines. But the debate is almost entirely about who gets access, while the process of how we get there continues to be sidelined. Meanwhile, the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) updated open access policy has come into effect, and national publisher deals have been struck. But this is set against questions about ‘who gets left behind‘ when access is treated as a procurement problem and lacks national infrastructure and strategy.

The NDIS debate shows what happens when processes are neglected, with the NDIS reform’s advisory committee having warned of material harm and that reform has been done to the disability community rather than with it. The process itself was described as “disrespectful,” and an extension was granted to the inquiry on the NDIS cuts.

There are calls for greater certainty for the NDIS within a complex and stressful system. Yet we also know that compliance-focused approaches alone are often not sufficient to create positive experiences for disabled people.¹ Bennison describes disability inclusion as not only being about technical access or compliance but also about dignity, autonomy, and belonging. Prakash shares that “disability is rarely neat, predictable or standardised,” and relying on actuarial assumptions, disconnected from lived realities, risks creating access that is itself inaccessible.

Many of these conversations touch on the principle of ‘leadership by those most impacted,’ recognising that those facing the greatest systemic barriers will often have their knowledge decentered or discredited, yet are often best equipped to produce solutions. Those solutions, however, require community trust and genuine engagement to restore a social license.

Complicating this landscape, amid stated efforts to restore the NDIS’s social licence, public debate has also perpetuated damaging narratives about access tied to fraud, cost, eligibility, and quality. While fraud is acknowledged as a problem, the risk is that participants bear the cost of these narratives.

In open scholarship, the same trends risk reproducing existing inequities in scholarly communications. For rare disease patients and their families, whether research findings and clinical data are openly shared can be the difference between a diagnosis and years spent in medical limbo.

Like the NDIS, open scholarly publishing is often met with myths and narratives about access tied to fraud and predatory practices, compliance, cost, and quality. Universities, and indeed, open access, also have their own social licence troubles. Narrow understandings and misunderstandings of open access reduce trust and limit the pathways and approaches we take to achieve openness.

Looking at national development in open access, and who gets left behind, Shafee (2026) explains:

“It’s understandable that treating research sharing as a procurement problem feels more manageable than tackling the harder work of infrastructure and capacity‑building. But that instinct for caution shouldn’t push us into entrenching the very problems we’re trying to solve.”

The process of how we solve problems, however, also matters. Alongside procurement, compliance is often framed as a problem to solve (or check off). While compliance conversations are part of the open access policy landscape, a narrow focus on meeting mandates can also reproduce existing structural problems. Moore (2024) flags the risks that a “culture of compliance” poses to library resourcing, cultures of openness, and attitudes toward open access.

To be effective, open access policy action requires local and community-led practices. Such practices require understanding the underlying governance and relational processes that drive access and community. In “Scaling Small” and Governing Together: Towards a National Diamond Open Access Consortium in Switzerland, diamond open access governance goes beyond funding mechanisms to address relational infrastructure.

“Co-design transforms stakeholders into active creators; it pools expertise, diversifies perspectives and builds shared ownership of a model that responds to the needs of the community” (Hahn and Aerni, 2026, pp. 4-5).

Co-design involves bottom-up processes; though, by nature, it is multi-directional, combining top-down and bottom-up inputs. In a multi-level and multi-faceted governance landscape, when done well, co-design and co-production can bridge community diversity and policy objectives. Such processes position lived experience and policy action (or grassroots communities and compliance) not as disparate conversations or mutually exclusive, but as driving change and strategy together. Done well, however, genuine co-production looks beyond technocratic priorities to understand relational impacts.

In research more broadly, conversations on ethical impact have started to go beyond traditional research outputs and the co-creation of research processes to include the co-production of impact itself. If impact is not only quantified but also felt (as a sense of community, belonging, and collaboration), treating access as a compliance endpoint will always miss why it actually matters to the people experiencing or needing it.

Access and impact have always been understood by those who need it most as an ongoing process. The NDIS reform debate could benefit from the growing recognition in open access that process matters as much as output. Likewise, national open access and research conversations could continue to learn from the disability community’s insistence that access and impact built without community leadership will fail the people they’re meant to serve.

1. Saia, T. (2022). Disability Cultural Centers in Higher Education. Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 35(1), 17-30. ↩︎