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 &quot;I prefer to fund people according to whether they have recently published in a luxury closed access journal&quot;.<p>I had the same thought as danieltillet while reading it - if they&#x27;re all equally good, then choose randomly instead of being consistently biased towards an arbitrary criterion that&#x27;s going to skew the system.