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These are thought-provoking.
1) Journals must pursue interoperability with the other online tools that are shaping the techne of scholarly practice. (Yes, they're completely out of sync.)
2) Journals have opportunity to reframe their role in the academy as curators of the noise of the web. (Excellent. See it as an opportunity. And they can deliver a lot of value this way.)
3) Electronic journals will have the opportunity to expand their curatorial mandate to include different forms of publication. (The author mentions "a twenty-minute audio segment, a selection of maps shared on SlideShare, or a video segment of a conference paper shared on YouTube" as examples. I agree that, "properly curated," these can advance the state of a discipline just as much as the current article form.)
4) Against exclusive publication. 5) Broadening the criteria for participation. 6) The reconsideration of timelines.
The big problem is how to fund something that looks, for instance, like #2 here. Academic journals have a certain functionality (create a legitimizing forum for research that gets people jobs, tenure, academic stature, etc) that makes them specifically valuable to academic institutions. Turning them into "curators of the noise of the web" is a neat idea, but who will convince academic institutions to pay for this new model?
Curation (reviewing) is already done on a volunteer basis in most fields. What you actually pay for is distribution, which arguably harkens back to pre-web times when paper had to be printed. Those people are still around, and have to be paid for their pointless input (your formatting is off, oh, and don't use type 2 fonts).
Conferences and journals that have turned into tenure-case circle jerks are also not very valuable outside of those circles.
Right, but the reason that labor is done on a volunteer basis has something to do with the inherent prestige of the legacy journals. In my field, anyone would gladly referee an article or review a book for the flagship journals, because they confer legitimacy on those involved with them. I can say from personal experience that new, more experimental journals don't have the same draw.
The big issue is who pays lead editors, though. Typically (at least in my field) the major journals have an institutional affiliation with a university, and the editors are professors at the university who receive a stipend and reduced teaching load in return for putting in a stint of a few years on the journal masthead. I've never asked too closely about the funding for these arrangements, but I have to imagine it comes from the universities themselves.
The question is: how do you convince the universities to do something similar, but not for a journal with a hundred year history in the field, but for one that is beginning right now and which follows a different format like the one espoused in the link? The two solutions are major institutional change among the administrators who fund this stuff, or finding a new model for paying editors. Based on my experiences in academia, I think the latter has a better shot, but it's still unclear how things will go.
At least in computer science, the universities aren't very involved. What is key is the reviewers; and in order to attract the good reviewers (which will attract the good content), usually that means it is the reviewers themselves setting up the new journal (e.g. as happened with the JMLR in Machine Learning). If you are a nobody, you have very little chance in starting a new successful journal; but if you are an accomplished researcher with a few good accomplished researcher friends...no problem.
In any case, these journals are run mostly by donations (donated time to review and edit, donated resources, paypal accounts, etc...). What is really interesting here are intentions: a platform to build fame and gain tenure, to disseminate results, or to nurture a fledgling field?
One of the issues with academic journal reinvention is mostly organizational - getting the buy in from a large variety of stake holders across academia and the industry, to take a stance on publishing only to open journals. So far, there hasn't really been a concentrated effort on this that I've seen.