Purpose: This paper investigates the obstacles faced by academic academics in accessing accounting and financial data from Iraqi economic organizations and assesses the effect of these barriers on the structure and quality of research. Design/methodology/approach: An embedded mixed-methods design combined a cross-sectional survey of 200 Iraqi accounting and finance researchers with ten short semi-structured interviews. The survey contained 30 barrier items, six research-impact items, and eight proposed remedies. Reliability analysis, parallel analysis, exploratory factor analysis, one-sample tests, Friedman and Kruskal–Wallis tests, correlations, and regression were used. Interview summaries were coded thematically and integrated with the quantitative findings.
Findings: Within the purposively recruited sample, 7.5% of respondents obtained all requested information, whereas 42.0% experienced refusal or no response. Barrier items formed one strong general access-barrier factor (alpha =.930; omega =.930), expressed through six diagnostic content domains. Overall barriers were high (M = 4.240, SD =.426), with organizational-administrative barriers ranked first (M = 4.430). The general barrier score was strongly associated with negative research impact (r =.719, p <.001; R2 =.517), and the association remained after adjustment for access outcome and researcher and institutional characteristics (standardized beta =.701, p <.001). Interviews showed that all ten participants had changed or reduced a sample, topic, or methodology because of inaccessible data. The most highly rated remedies were anonymized/redacted data access and a maximum response period with reasoned refusal. 
Originality/value:The study reframes accounting-data access as research infrastructure and identifies data-availability-induced research selection bias: researchers study what can be accessed rather than what is most scientifically important. It provides integrated quantitative and qualitative evidence on this problem in the Iraqi context.