In the US, a new report on Scholarly Publishing Roundtable Report and Recommendations wants to be optimistic about Open Access, but contains, as its recommendation n. 2, the following:

Agencies should establish specific embargo periods between publication and public access. An embargo period of between zero (for open access journals) and twelve months currently reflects such a balance for many science disciplines. For other fields a longer embargo period may be necessary.

This is totally unreasonable, coming from the "Committee on Science and Technology of the United States House of Representatives, in coordination with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy".

I would suggest that these people, representing The People, reconsider their position: this recommendation simply states, openly and plainly, that the interest of the publisher has diverged completely from the interest of the scientists they are supposed to serve.

I would recommend to read again my old article on Scholarly Publishing, which, by the way, got the best paper award from Novatica in 2006.

There have been many disparate experiments worldwide in building higher education diplomas offering some form of specialization in Free and Open Source Software over the last years.

We are many to believe that it is time to bring all academics having worked in this area together to build together a Free and Open Source Software curriculum schema for higher education in IT. It will be a long lasting effort, and the first significant step will be the FOSS Curriculum event in Paris, in the framework of the Open World Forum.

The following call for comments and contribution details the scope of this action.

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