Ian Fwd:
...More than 800 British researchers have joined 22,000 others from 161 countries in a campaign to boycott publishers of scientific journals who refuse to make research papers freely available on the internet after six months...
...Elsevier Science and other journal publishers effectively benefit from the public purse twice: once when taxpayer-funded scientists submit their work to the journals for free, and again when taxpayer-funded libraries buy the information back from them in the form of subscriptions....
--------------
I wouldn't wait around for publishers to respond to a boycott. It will take more than that to alter the direction of privatizing scientific research results.
(Arguing with myself no doubt) I would organize to do two different approaches. The first would be to set-up multiple and independent web databases, run by a consortium of public universities as a depository. The MIT example of putting courses on the web is a great example---if it is true. UCB in general on the other hand is a very bad example, since they quasi-privatized their computer systems ten years ago and handed over control to a semi-independent entity. In other words what goes up on their system isn't under the control of the faculty. (However, UCB also has one of the best examples of how to do such a database, see Astrophysics example below)
If the EU has better publishing laws, I'd physically locate repositories and databases in a countries with better laws--or looser laws or even better, no law for that matter.
An example of what they might face if they tried to set up an independent database here in the US, can be seen in the demise of a math encyclopedia project that used to be known as Eric's Treasure Trove. See the CRC lawsuit (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ ) for details.
It's not apparent from the lawsuit, but the fact is there was nothing on that site that should have been copyrighted since it was all standard mathematics from mathematicians who were dead, waay dead, or beyond dead---mere legend. The problem was the guy who developed the site had signed a contract to do a similar job for CRC and they decided his previous work was part of their copyright. On the other hand there are probably no heros in this suit, since Wolfram (Eric Weisstein's employer) is the software company that produces Mathematica---and sponsored the site. So the bottom line is a struggle between two corporations, both trying to screw people interested in mathematics. But clearly CRC press is the bigger pig in this case.
The other approach to take would be to establish a system of independent journals run directly through universities. As far as I can tell all the editorial work is paid for by university salaries anyway, and that leaves the physical printing. Most of the bigger public universities already have a press. The trouble is that of course faculty have no access to their own institution's presses and no means of getting it. Also, places like UCB seem to forget/remember they are public institutions (see Genetech v Regents of UCB) only when they smell money---which stance they take depends on where the money is.
So, I wouldn't expect much help from the US scientific community. You can bet that anybody who published with an alternate journal or outside this mainstream market driven game would get boycotted by the established journals in return. And, if an alternate publishing route developed, it would effectively taint anybody associated with it.
It seems to me the key to making the boycott work, would be to get the peer review panels to explicitly boycott reading and reviewing the established journal submissions. This is also not very likely since this gets down to the real old-boy network which is full of back-scratching and log rolling---and their reciprocals, back-biting and shit-canning.
What movements like this boycott need is for some professional association to get on board and take up the cause, which is also very unlikely, since their own credibility would go down the toilet.
But jesus it sure would be nice to see cracks develop in this bullshit privatization of science fortress, somewhere.
An example of what broad based public accessibility to scientific knowledge should look like can be found here in astrophysics:
(http://cfpa.berkeley.edu/home.html), (http://xxx.lanl.gov/lists/astro-ph/new)
What you find is one course and lecture notes (boo, should be all courses, but physics 112 could be used as an example of what they should look like, see http://cfpa.berkeley.edu/Physics_112/).
However, the research work on the lanl site is completely written up and abstracts are used as an index, with complete articles to download. This is a basic model for how science should be done, and how it should be made completely public for those interested.
As an aside, these two sites are unix based systems and if you are running something like FreeBSD, the access and downloads are fast, clean, and pop open ghostveiw or gv to read the articles or print them out. So here is a complete system from website to userland, using software systems that are freely available. The underlying text layout work is done in TeX or LaTeX then compiled into DVI (src) and PS and then tarred/gzipped as an archive. They even post their system logs (or used to) as a sort of popularity contest. (See:http://cfpa.berkeley.edu/logs/report.html)
Of course there are three very good reasons these examples even exists. First, they were jointly funded (fed/state, nsf/ucb) and second, nobody understands the material, so it is completely safe to post. Third, all of it is completely unusable by capital. There just isn't anyway at the moment to capitalize on cosmology research---although I am sure somebody is working overtime trying to patent the big bang or do something useful (ie profitable) with it. Applications in weapons of mass destruction, star wars, and national security are promising future routes of course.
In the meantime, I think these are good examples for a model on how to set-up non-privatized science.
Chuck Grimes