Opening the MLA
Eileen A. Joy's open letter is, as it happens, open in more ways than one, as it is all about opening up various barriers separating the MLA (both its conferences and its publications) from the general and/or general academic public. I confess that I've left my own MLA membership lapse this year: PMLA usually doesn't run articles that are useful for my line of work (which is not a knock on PMLA; I write about out-of-the-way fiction, after all...), and on the occasions that it does, I can get them through electronic databases; nor am I interested in attending the MLA, a conference I find deeply unpleasant, unless I happen to be on the program and/or conducting interviews*; nor am I presently on the job market. In any event, Joy has three interesting suggestions:
1) An all-disciplinary, subscription-funded alternative to Academia.edu. In other words, eliminate the commercial aspects of Academia.edu's project. I'm perhaps a leeeetle skeptical that a big site like this, no matter how carefully constructed, would "practically run itself"--besides the technical bugs, I can see all sorts of things happening in "anarchic" fashion that might lead to disasters befitting the current Star Wars film--but the idea works as a "put up or shut up" challenge to those who don't like Academia.edu. The MLA's obvious response would be to inquire why it should function as an open-source clearing house for all of academic knowledge, to which I suppose one could respond in turn that it might constitute a kind of service to the profession as a whole at a time when the whole is pretty embattled, rather than to a specific subset of the academic population.
2) Open up PMLA. The MLA took a teensy-tiny step in this direction in 2012, but hasn't stepped much further. I wonder to what extent this would be financially feasible without some combination of jacking up fees and requiring subvention costs. The MLA's 990s indicate that publications are by far the dominant chunk of its revenue--$10,401,972 out of a total revenue of $16,144,330 in 2013, for example, whereas the convention itself brought in $1,501,713--which means that making its publications open-access might cause some pretty significant hardship. Membership rate hikes and subvention costs alike would hit less privileged academics (adjuncts, graduate students, faculty at smaller colleges) harder than those at prestigious R1s.
3) Down with the security guards! Strictly speaking, there are probably never going to be very many people randomly walking into the convention without being registered for it, thanks to the restrictions on hotel reservations; it costs much more to get to the conference than to attend it. That being said, I'm not sure that the folks in the book exhibit hall would appreciate the disappearance of the security guards. The conference isn't what you'd call enormously profitable in the first place, so I can see this argument being regarded with something of a jaundiced eye. I suspect losing the guards would be easier if you decoupled the MLA from its current primary function as a hiring convention, which would make the whole shebang much smaller.
*--I should note that the last time around, I advocated for Skype instead of the MLA, and will raise the question again the next time we have a search.