March 28, 2001

This week's _Chronicle of Higher Education_ contains a summary of a promising movement in the natural sciences to boycott scholarly journals that do not put their contents online, free of charge, within six months of publication. You can see the article at http://chronicle.com/free/2001/03/2001032601t.htm

The movement was started with a letter to the editor of _Science Magazine_, published in the March 23 issue. You can find the text of the letter at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5512/2318a.

To accompany the letter, the authors have created a web site to collect signatures supporting their idea. I urge you to visit the site and read the open letter there (not the same as the letter published in _Science_) and their FAQ. If you can support their idea, then you should consider signing the petition. The URL is http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/.

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Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters