Whats the point of the signatures?
Signatories are pledging to help the cause in any of the ways open to them as individuals or organizations. The principal reason to solicit signatures is to solicit these pledges of assistance and participation. But an important secondary consideration is that all of us can draw strength and encouragement from the particular names and the growing number of signatories. For example, individual scholars who share our vision might feel powerless to the extent that they feel alone; the list of signatories should encourage them to act, e.g. by self-archiving their articles or submitting them to open access journals. Journals and publishers might defer change if they believe the demand for it is small; seeing the list of signatories should support a decision to move toward open access. The long and public list of signatures to the Public Library of Science (PLoS) open letter has clearly given proponents of open access this kind of encouragement. While our initiative differs from PLoS, PLoS p
