[ Note from moderator: While interesting, this thread is off-topic and list policy does not allow for discussion. Posts sent after tomorrow will not be forwarded. Thanks. ] Dear colleagues, although this petition may be useful, I think there is much more to be done here. For the time being, it is quite difficult to boycott any commercial publisher unless you are an experienced sommité in your domain. For instance, PhD students need to publish in highly-rated journals or conferences, which are almost always associated to a publisher like Elsevier or Springer. To fight this situation, and as in the case of the free software movement, the best strategy is in my view to develop a high-quality alternative to commercial scientific publishing. For instance, the said sommités could join (or create) programme and editing committees of journals and conferences publishing only under a totally-open access scheme (i.e gratis for authors and readers, as well as under a "free" licence, such as the Creative Commons - Attribution - Share-Alike licence). As a matter of fact, as most know, this is already the case with publications such as TAC or LMCS and with conferences relying on the EPTCS proceedings. Besides, it is easy to setup a site as an ArXiv overlay to rely on the long-lastingness of this publication platform. In ten years or so, with such committees and a good editing policy, such journals or conferences will be as well ranked as commercial ones. However the subscription to the Elsevier or Springer electronic library will be needed for a long time, just to be able to get digitized versions of papers from the second half of the last century. This is a second, trickier, battlefield in the sense that the figth here must be carried on the copyright front. First, the copyright now extends far too long after the author's death. Secondly, some publishers, when digitizing some work, state wrongly that they perform a creative step, which prolongs their copyright by "resetting" the creation date. Here, the fight can almost only be solved by advocating politicians. All the best dc -- David Chemouil Onera - DTIM Tel./fax: +33 (0) 5 6225 2936 / 2593 <http://www.onera.fr/staff/david-chemouil> [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]