This, translated to your question, means that without grant acquiring skills, in some areas in university, one has minute, if any, chance of being employed. Couple of issues: this was never mentioned in my six years of education so far (and i only learned about it because i was discussing designing a taught subject on a BA course with a colleague – so, a question of ‘how do we justify it’ arose, hence the research impact). Which means that in some fields, what are the most essential skills for one to be employed in the field one day (finding grants, finding CFPs, publishing in ‘RIGHT’ journals, based on ‘RIGHT’ lists), is never taught. We are left to figure all of this out on our own. Of course, this is far from being applicable to all fields and all recruitment panels, but the trend is going this way.

another, bigger issue, is that careers today depend on publishing in the ‘right’, and not any journals. In the case of business schools, which are an exploding area of growth, there’s a guide for UK, ABS Journal Quality Guide, which lists journals which the association holds relevant to the field, with rankings – available at http://www.the-abs.org.uk/?id=257 . In purely instrumental thinking, if you want a job in business schools, you better publish in those journals. Hence, you better follow their CFPs. Perhaps a bodies like ABS (association of business schools) should be providing the easy way to follow CFPs, given that they dictate where one should publish
in order to be employable in the field.

Come to think of it, I’d like to have the same thing for grants. I know only one PhD student who actually knows how to look for grants, because she used to work as a fundraiser; I and everyone else I know see this as black magic and are totally clueless about it.

1. I wouldn’t emphasise as much the software paradigm, and would probably scrap the part “What if software were developed through closed models”. I don’t think it brings a lot to the discussion of publication, except to show that open processes are successful in programming.

2. The speed of innovation is not as clear cut… True, opensource softwares have been at the hear of important innovations. But commercial companies also have been very quick to foster major developments… They also have more focus on usability/GUI than open source contributors might do.

3. I am also at the LSE (Economics) and have certainly been given the opposite advice: to be bold and daring! So no generalisation… it’s probably highly dependant on the topic, and its internal dynamism (the two issues being obviously linked in both directions).

4. Also, I think one point that you do not mention at all is the potential unintended consequences of non-anonymous refereeing.

In a given specialty, there are not that many people worldwide that can comment. It means that people working on the same topic as you are going to be people you interact repeatedly within your career.
If you are not anonymous anymore, and you get rejected for (what you believe to be) the wrong reason, you’d probably be mad at the referee and will want to reject his next work… In the long term, it’s probably for the quality of the research if it’s very hard to publish and everyone tries to shoot down bad ideas, but one also needs to think about the incentives on the writer’s side… If it’s so hard, maybe it’s not that fun as a career.
The argumetn goes also the way around: if you have to ref someone who is known to be influential (not necess. for publication but for other academic issues), you might not want to reject that person if you are going to apply to his university for instance.

Just to say that these “reputation” issue should be taken into account when considering non-anonymous refereeing, which is part of the Open-Process you propose.