Yeah, the casual suggestion that MIT should try to badly damage the careers of most of its faculty (presumably causing them to leave) suggests that he hasn't thought about this problem very long or talked about it with many people. As much as I dislike academic publishing, the last thing I want is to have deans and their staff evaluate the merits of research on a case by case basis. It sounds nice in theory, I guess, but they're people with agendas and biases too, and even setting that aside, they don't have the time or the training to do it. (as an, I hope, neutral example: could a dean trained as an economist really evaluate the relative merits of 15 different experimental physics papers? Could a trained physicist really evaluate the contributions of 15 different economics papers?) (note that this all applies to deans at other universities. The deans at my university are of course exceptional and above reproach).
So, on the one hand, even MIT probably can't unilaterally make a lot of progress on this issue. On the other hand... almost every recent paper I've ever been interested in is available from the author's webpage (making this quote: "much of the work produced in academia is never seen by anyone outside that cloistered world, because everyone who’s not affiliated with a university is cut off from access" ring hollow to me), all of the work to produce the journals is done for free or nearly free by researchers, and (anecdotally) everyone prefers electronic copies of the journal articles anyway. It seems like open access publication is almost inevitable.
A more manageable (but less sexy) step might be for MIT and other universities to defray the admin costs for some of these flagship journals that want to go open-access. The article mentions the American Historical Review as having annual (editorial) costs of about $500k [1], which is tiny for a university.
You're right that the central challenge here is helping academics evaluate each other's work without relying so heavily on journal titles, closed access journals or otherwise. There is some movement here. Increasingly hiring committees are taking other reputation metrics into account when evaluating work (inbound citation counts, readership metrics, follower counts - anything that may make the job of an evaluation committee a little bit easier).
The fact that papers you are looking for tend to be available on author's webpages is atypical. A very small percentage of the 2 million papers published each year is available online for free. Institutions pay $8 billion a year to subscribe to journals, and they would be only too glad to cancel those subscriptions if they could.
>The fact that papers you are looking for tend to be available on author's webpages is atypical. A very small percentage of the 2 million papers published each year is available online for free.
I'd love to see data on this, so I can see why my experience is atypical: are conventions different in some fields than others? Do I just have good luck? Am I misremembering or just wrong (which is possible)? The original article states, "Much of the work produced in academia is never seen by anyone outside that cloistered world, because everyone who’s not affiliated with a university is cut off from access" and I'd really like to know exactly which articles Manjoo has looked for and been unable to find w/out a university license. Institutional access needs to be a lot more comprehensive than what almost any individual needs access to, so I don't think that their subscription costs really are compelling evidence against my experience.
I'm kind of surprised that no one's pointed out an easy and really effective step MIT could take unilaterally: make all of the journals the MIT Press publishes open access (MIT is also a publisher). Some of them are among the best journals in their fields (e.g. the Quarterly Journal of Economics is one of the 4 most prestigious journals in econ and the Review of Economics and Statistics is very very good).
So, on the one hand, even MIT probably can't unilaterally make a lot of progress on this issue. On the other hand... almost every recent paper I've ever been interested in is available from the author's webpage (making this quote: "much of the work produced in academia is never seen by anyone outside that cloistered world, because everyone who’s not affiliated with a university is cut off from access" ring hollow to me), all of the work to produce the journals is done for free or nearly free by researchers, and (anecdotally) everyone prefers electronic copies of the journal articles anyway. It seems like open access publication is almost inevitable.
A more manageable (but less sexy) step might be for MIT and other universities to defray the admin costs for some of these flagship journals that want to go open-access. The article mentions the American Historical Review as having annual (editorial) costs of about $500k [1], which is tiny for a university.
[1] From this post: http://blog.historians.org/news/1734/aha-statement-on-schola...