I call crap on this. He wants more work in journals so academics can sort out their pecking order. The rest of us dont want an emphasis on traditional journals because they are an expensive and time consuming gateway to the dissemination of ideas. I really hate to track down an interesting idea, only to be presented by an abstract with the real paper behind a fee wall. Some authors are considerate enough to have an online version, but not all. I say other disciplines should "grow up" and embrace the online publication of papers.
I think your comment is tangential to the central thrust of the article. He's not really stating anything one way or the other about the free availability of papers online. That's an issue that will exist whether papers are published in journals or in conference proceedings. (Both options are expensive and time consuming, just in different ways.)
The main idea here, paraphrasing Fortnow, is that computer science needs to put more emphasis on publishing longer-form pieces representing bigger chunks of work in a context that allows for them to receive more thorough review. The conference publication model is fine for an emerging field: everyone is still sorting out the basics, so publishing small bits of work frequently is a good idea. But, Fortnow argues, once a field becomes established, encouraging frequent publication of small chunks of work in settings that have become highly competitive leads to incrementalism, low quality peer review, and other ill effects. Encouraging longer submissions, each representing a larger chunk of work, and each of which can receive more attention from reviewers, will hopefully have the effects of encouraging researchers to pursue riskier work and of putting reviewers more at ease with less derivative papers.
I think that's what he was saying, anyway. Or at least part of it.
The issues of open access and how to fund scientific publications are certainly important, but I think this article was really focusing on other issues.
