Just had a chance to get to this. This article is particularly ill-informed, even by the standard of pieces about OA. The 30% profit margin argument is bogus and makes inaccurate comparisons to other industries. The history of ESA is simply wrong. The "proper" use of income from publications is in fact the norm for professional societies and has been for decades. The point about the cost of a subscription to a journal overlooks the most significant trend in scholarly publishing today, namely, that most materials are purchased in aggregations, not on a stand-alone basis (and if you can figure out the cost of a journal that is part of an aggregation, good luck). 

Whatever we may think about OA or traditional demand-driven publishing, can't we at least get the basic facts straight? One would hope that a discussion of scholarly publishing would not easily be compared to the fulminations on Fox News and MSNBC.

Joe Esposito