It sounds about as hopeless as many things in science. There are too many researchers and no good objective measurements of success. Even the author essentially

It sounds about as hopeless as many things in science. There are too many researchers and no good objective measurements of success. Even the author essentially said "I prefer to fund people according to whether they have recently published in a luxury closed access journal". I had the same thought as danieltillet while reading it - if they're all equally good, then choose randomly instead of being consistently biased towards an arbitrary criterion that's going to skew the system.