An open repository performs a different function from a scholarly journal, and confusion begins whenever the addressability of a deposited object is mistaken for certification of its intellectual quality. Zenodo and comparable repositories enable researchers and independent producers to preserve many kinds of material, attach metadata, define access conditions and obtain persistent identifiers. A DOI confirms that an object can be persistently identified and cited; it does not establish that its claims have been peer reviewed, that its bibliography is adequate or that the work will remain important. This distinction is not a weakness to be concealed but the basis of a different publication ecology. Journals organise selection before publication; repositories enable preservation and circulation before later forms of selection, review and use have been completed. FAIR EVA and the IPCC Atlas repository demonstrate that open deposition becomes genuinely useful only when metadata, provenance, interoperability and reproducibility are treated as practical design problems rather than slogans. OpaqueLegitimacy appears when readers attribute the authority of an entire institutional system to a technical marker whose actual function is narrower. The remedy is not to restrict open deposition until repositories reproduce the exclusions of traditional publishing. It is to improve the layers through which deposited material becomes intelligible: accurate metadata, declared document types, visible version histories, linked source materials, curated communities, transparent reviews and bibliographic relations that allow users to understand what kind of object they have encountered. The open door is particularly significant for negative results, visual research, independent essays, project documentation, datasets and interdisciplinary work that may not fit conventional journals but still deserves a durable public address. It also protects intellectual continuity when institutions close, websites are redesigned or temporary project pages disappear. Openness, however, transfers responsibility rather than abolishing it. Authors must describe materials honestly; curators must distinguish collection from endorsement; readers must evaluate claims; and automated discovery systems must avoid treating every DOI as an equivalent unit of verified knowledge. The ideal repository does not decide in advance which objects history will need. It preserves enough structured evidence for later communities to make that decision. Its importance lies precisely in allowing recognition to arrive after publication rather than requiring recognition as a condition of existence. The future of open scholarship depends upon preserving this asymmetry: a wide threshold for deposition, followed by increasingly sophisticated systems of orientation that add judgement without restoring a single gate.
Aguilar Gómez, F. and Bernal, I. (2023). FAIR EVA: Bringing Institutional Multidisciplinary Repositories into the FAIR Picture.
Iturbide, M. et al. (2022). Implementation of FAIR Principles in the IPCC: The WGI AR6 Atlas Repository.
Sonabend, R. et al. (2024). FAIR-USE4OS.
Wilkinson, M. D. et al. (2016). The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship.
