Borgman, Scharnhorst and Golshan argue that digital data archives should be understood as knowledge infrastructures, not passive repositories, because they actively mediate how research data are deposited, curated, discovered, accessed and reused across changing scholarly communities . Their case study of DANS, the Dutch Data Archiving and Networked Services institute, opens the “black box” of the archive by examining contributors, consumers and archivists as interdependent actors within a sociotechnical system. The article demonstrates that openness is never achieved by mandate alone: it depends on labour-intensive curation, metadata creation, preservation policy, technical standards, access governance and continuing institutional investment. Contributors often submit data infrequently, may restrict access to retain credit or control, and require assistance in preparing files for long-term use; consumers are more diverse than contributors and often use data for background knowledge, teaching, cultural work or new research. Archivists therefore become mediators rather than custodians, balancing openness with protection, automation with craft, and preservation with discoverability. A key case study is DANS/EASY, whose page 11 figure shows granular access conditions, while the page 20 diagram maps the relationships between contributors, repositories, interfaces, harvesters, search engines and users. The article’s decisive insight is that data reuse depends less on data availability alone than on the invisible human and technical arrangements that make data intelligible beyond their original context. Consequently, sustainable open science requires not only repositories, but durable infrastructures of mediation capable of adapting as communities, technologies and evidentiary practices evolve.