Open to All? Repository Workflows for Ethical Access, FAIRness, and Cultural Heritage Data

Open repositories are critical infrastructures for sustaining open knowledge exchange, advancing FAIR principles, and enabling long-term preservation. At the same time, they increasingly operate under pressure from ethical obligations, community authority, and emerging technologies such as automation and AI-driven reuse. These pressures raise a central question for repositories today: what does it mean to be "open to all" in practice? This paper examines how repository workflows, infrastructure choices, and staff practices operationalise FAIR principles while negotiating the limits of openness when stewarding sensitive cultural and linguistic heritage data. Drawing on two contrasting case studies from the University of Cape Town Libraries in South Africa, it demonstrates how openness is produced through socio-technical decision-making rather than assumed as a default. By comparing these repositories, the paper highlights how platform affordances, governance models, and staff expertise mediate FAIRness, machine reuse, and ethical stewardship. It argues that integrating CARE principles alongside FAIR is essential for building repositories that are sustainable, accountable, and genuinely open in an AI-intensive research landscape.