TITLE: global fibrations of simplicial sheaves
QUESTION [12 upvotes]: I'm reading the classical Brown-Gersten's paper "Algebraic K-theory as generalized sheaf cohomology" and I'm stuck with their choose of global fibrations. Namely, a morphism of simplicial sheaves $p : E \longrightarrow B$ is a global fibration if for every inclusion of open sets $U\subset V$ the natural map $E(V) \longrightarrow B(V) \times_{B(U)} E(U)$ is a (Kan) fibration of simplicial sets.
My problem is: why these fibrations? As far as I can see, when they make use of this definition in constructing the factorizations of the model category structure, they could have chosen the fibrations to be defined open-wise: $p : E \longrightarrow B$ is a fibration if $p(V) : E(V) \longrightarrow B(V)$ is a (Kan) fibration of simplicial sets for every open set $V$ and apply as well the small object argument they use at this point.
In other contexts I understand this kind of fibrations. For instance, for the model structure of the category of diagrams $C^I$ of a model category $C$ when $I$ is a 'very small' category (Dwyer-Spalinski, "Homotopy theories"), or a Reedy category. In these cases, this kind of fibrations ensures that you can extend your liftings by induction. But I don't see if this is their role with a category of sheaves, since no induction seems to be at hand.
A colleague of mine has said to me thas this choice of fibrations is the consequence of choosing the cofibrations to be the monomorphism, following Joyal's "Letter to Grothendieck"; that is, these are precisely the fibrations if you choose monomorphisms as cofibrations and ask fibrations to have the RLP with respect to trivial cofibrations. But I couldn't find anywhere this famous Joyal's letter, so I would also be glad if someone could tell me where I can find it.
Thanks in advance for any hints.

REPLY [5 votes]: For model structures on simplicial sheaves, there is a difference between the Joyal-Jardine approach and the Brown-Gersten approach. This is well explained in Voevodsky's preprint: Homotopy theory of simplicial presheaves in completely decomposable topologies, available here. Briefly, the Brown-Gersten approach does not work for arbitrary sites, but it works for a class of sites defined in Voevodsky's paper - this class includes Noetherian finite-dimensional spaces. When the B-G approach works, the resulting model structure has better finiteness properties than the Joyal-Jardine model structure, which on the other hand can be defined for simplicial (pre)sheaves on any site.