All,

two short updates.

1) Daniel, myself and others at WMF reviewed the response to the White House RFI on open access that Daniel drafted and circulated earlier on the list [1]. We submitted the response an hour ago as the deadline was today, DC time. If you wish to be more involved in the OA area of interest please let Daniel know and we will try and give a longer notice on these and similar initiatives. On a related note, for those of you interested in US public policy on open access, an article was recently created on enwiki to document the Research Works Act [2]. You're welcome to contribute if the topic is of interest.

2) I have been reporting updates on RCom activities on a regular basis in the monthly report of the Foundation (e.g. [3]). I usually put together a paragraph or two before the report is due at the end of each month but to simplify the process I started an etherpad where we can dump notes of items that need to be included in each report [4] Feel free to add any activity you do in the context of RCom if you want me to report it. Eventually we will link (if not transclude) the RCom section in the monthly reports from the RCom page on Meta.

Dario

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Committee/Areas_of_interest/Open-acc... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_December_2011#Re... [4] http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/RComMonthlyReports2012