Dear Roberto,

thank you for the fast response to my last email.

Our decision is to retrieve the manuscript. We do not agree with the publication decision and we have reasons to be afraid that, even if our points would be accepted, the manuscript would still be treated unfairly by the Associate Editor in the following rounds of the review process. The reasons for our disagreement with the publication decision are detailed in the attached document. Our lack of confidence in the objectivity of the reviewing process is explained in the P.S. note.

We do not expect you to change your decision on the basis of this email and the attached document, but you may want to follow this up and you may want to forward our comments to the Associate Editor in charge of he paper and to the referees. Whatever you decide, we thank you for handling the manuscript and for doing your best to get the reports.

Upon submission of the paper to another journal we will provide the Editor of that journal with our correspondence with you, with the Associate Editor's and referees' reports, and with our reply to the comments in the reports, in order for him/her to form a clear idea of the issue at hand.

Sincerely,

Ivan Markovsky and Paolo Rapisarda

P.S.: This is a personal comment. In official correspondence we have to respect the anonymity of the Associate Editor, although we believe that we have correctly guessed his identity --- Y. Fujisaki.

We are rather disappointed not only about the decision and the reasons adduced to justify it, but also about the way the review process has been dealt with. This is all the more regrettable considering our honest and open attitude to Fujisaki regarding his results quoted in reference [3] of the manuscript.

Paolo Rapisarda invited several times since July 2004 Fujisaki to publish his result (reference [3] from the manuscript) in an international journal, to no avail. Last July at the MTNS conference we had what they believed was an open discussion with him on the issue of publishing our results on data-driven control in a journal paper, in which discussion he confirmed that submitting our results for publication was "fine for him". We also sent him a couple of weeks after that meeting, a research report with the results contained in the submitted manuscript.

The net result of our open and fair attitude has been what we believe is an unjustified delay of 3.5 months in the reviewing of the manuscript. One instance of what we believe is the unduly stance of the Associate Editor is the request in his report to downplay the importance of our results and cite his conference papers on the subject (one of which is quoted and credited in the manuscript) as "important".