In the base game, you just click the mouse when looking in the direction of a button and the door slides open. However, thanks to the floaty jank of VR controls, pressing a button is now made twice as difficult somehow since you won't get a physical tactile response when your hand is on the button. Having to physically look away while wearing your choice of VR headset now makes you even more vulnerable to 173 if you mess up. My advice is to find a safe zone, find any door that looks attractive enough, get married, and practice your left backhand

on the button so you can more easily open doors directly behind you.

Another thing to note is that doors are a simple toggle of opened or closed, kinda like minecraft, except even better cause there's no awkward collision sticking out of the door itself, just a Star Trek-esque sliding door. I've never even seen Star Trek don't @ me.

When a door is open, this means a few things:

• +Player can pass through freely, making it easier to run away from the monsters when they chase you.
  
• -Monsters can pass through, making it easier to catch up to the player, or catch them off guard for haphazardly leaving breadcrumbs through their environment.

When a door is closed, it probably means much of the opposite:

• -Player cannot pass through doors while being chased, making them slow down enough for monsters to catch up to them.
  
• +Monsters cannot get through doors, leaving them stuck while the player gets away.

Seems simple enough, but any player who has encountered each SCP for an extended period of time may notice unique behavior between them, such as how they interact with doors.

Blocked by doors:
173: Will still teleport to the other sides of doors once the player escapes to a few rooms away. (In the base game, could pry doors open, making a lowed metal stretching sound.) Usually spawns a few rooms ahead of the player more time outta 10 to cross paths and catch them off guard.
966: Will still teleport around to different rooms within the vicinity of the player once their containment chamber has been first encountered.

Can open doors/Not effected by doors:
106: Can pass through walls, but thankfully walks at a slow fixed pace.
096: Bursts through doors when aggro'd and chasing the player. May despawn if the player gets far away enough during the "babbling" phase, but will most likely respawn later in another room or one of the endings. (at least in the base game.)
049: Intelligent and courteous enough to use buttons.

As you can see, monsters that chase the player through the common halls will still despawn to move around the facility after being stuck behind doors long enough, so opened and closed doors are only permanent to the player. It wouldn't be as fun or well balanced if they just stayed put in whatever room you closed them in, and would shatter the impression that they have believable behavioral patterns.

With what you've seen of the amazing "balance" in enemy behavior that you didn't think this game had, it's more likely that you'll encounter monsters either way since most of them can still get around doors later or are just too cool to be effected by them. So here are some points/strats to help you make that decision yourself:

Casual's Gambit, All Doors Left Open: Be it intentional or not by the original devs, having most of the monsters pass through doors anyway might be an interesting way to raise the floor of difficulty since new and old players alike are most likely to just leave all the doors open anyway. All doors are closed by default to the player, (unless 079 decides to spook the player with a much louder already opened door that closes on you) and since the game revolves mainly around exploration, you'll probably just be looking for more closed doors to open and mark off your path. In theory, you're just opening yourself up more to 173 who forces the player to drop everything and exercise cautious movement, as opposed to all the other SCPs who just chase you. That being said, of course you can always run away from the other SCPs, BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE FOREVER! but make sure to remember not to keep heading in the direction of unopened doors if you can help it. Running into new areas will slow you down having to open all those doors, and could lead you blindly to a dead end hallway or keycard reader, or aggro new SCPs you run into.

Crossing Guard: Leave all the hallway doors and sub-room (dead ends or SCP chamber) doors open, but every time you find a 3 or 4 way cross section, close the doors behind you. This is a good way to keep whole sections of the explored layout open while limiting the reach of Peanut or the others when they decide to spawn in one section of the map. The large sized corridors you leave open will let you run through fast enough while giving the SCPs plenty of room to despawn, and even if they decide to take their time despawning behind a door, you can bide your time to explore another section of the map.