<p>Advocates for open science argue that it democratizes access to and benefits from scientific knowledge. However, large-scale infrastructures such as public scientific databases are typically managed by closed organizations not subject to public democratic governance and that rely on a mix of volunteering, philanthropy, and service revenue alongside public funds. We argue that organizations are fruitful and overlooked objects of study for setting and implementing policies for open science to achieve just and equitable benefits. To this point, we show how social science theories of organizational path dependence and cumulative advantage predict that commonly adopted organizational policies will lead to negative outcomes under a wide range of conditions. In particular, we focus on epistemic oppression, which Kristie Dotson defines as persistent epistemic exclusion from knowledge production. We use examples from biodiversity science to illustrate how our theoretical inferences can apply to current practices. While advocates of open science highlight its intended benefits for justice, we hypothesize that openness will generally exacerbate oppression without additional measures to change the governance of the organizations involved.</p>