Actually I misunderstood how the author of that blog read the papers necessary to help his son (I read the story a while back).
Here is another link from his blog:
http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/
And under the section called "A regret: Not pushing for open-access" he says:
"My hope is that tenure will provide me opportunities to steadily shift computer science and medicine toward high-quality, high-impact open access venues.
The reason I feel especially ashamed over my behavior is that in the course of my research for my son, I have used my privilege as an academic to punch through paywalls with impunity to reach medical papers.
In a damning irony, even this paper is behind a paywall.
I realize that few patients or parents have the ability to do what I did, and they never will, until all of academic medicine goes open access.
In computer science, academic paywalls stifle.
In medicine, academic paywalls kill."
I suppose the main point still stands.