If employers and funding agencies would stop using publications in private, for-profit journals to evaluate whether researchers should get to keep their job or have their grants renewed, then this wouldn't be an issue.

This is a good point, but it actually goes further up the chain. The universities in UK, a lot of their funding is driven from publication record of their staff. So they too are just responding to incentives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Excellence_Framework

The major UK research funding councils have an open access policy for the next REF - http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/policy/

Nice, that is good to see.

That sounds doable, actually. Have the NSF only base their grants on publications in open access journals.

Or even just weight any open access journal more than any closed journal.

That way you can still use historical publications to evaluate researchers on day one, and the evaluations will be accurate assuming most researchers historically each published the same percentage of articles in open access journals, but nobody will want to publish in anything but an open access journal going forward.

And if experts would stop reviewing articles for free...

You mean, if researchers would voluntarily send their papers to black holes that won't get read until someone who is duplicating their work does a literature search.

Journal reputation is a rather effective filter on paper quality, and the open access journal business model has a very uphill battle to fight, since it looks very close to the scumbag, predatory "you pay, we publish, no questions asked" [1] model of garbage.

[1] Really scumbag: "You just literally copy-pasted someone else's entire research paper and slapped your name on it? We don't care."

> You mean, if researchers would voluntarily send their papers to black holes that won't get read until someone who is duplicating their work does a literature search.

This argument is quite common. I actually don't agree with it. Right now there are many second-tier and third-tier outlets that lock up research that nobody reads. Nobody would be denied tenure or refused promotion for not publishing in those journals. By publishing your lesser research in open access journals, there's a chance someone might read it. You could build an open-access infrastructure there.

Even worse private journals which have higher super insane rates just to get access to the database with the journal. Look at JsTor