Open Access Landscape in 2003

As we established BDL in 2003, there were several interesting developments in the open access landscape.

1. The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing was developed in April and released in June.

2. "Sabo bill," the Public Access to Science Act, was introduced in US House in June. The bill would have excluded "from copyright protection works resulting from scientific research substantially funded by the federal government." This effort failed, but was a precursor of the more moderate NIH Public Access Policy passed in December 2007.

3. The Public Library of Science launched in October.

4. The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in Science and the Humanities released in October.

In this environment BioMed Central operated an active independent journal program, which encouraged development of open access journals on discrete topics (perhaps exacerbating the problem of scholarly journal "twigging.") This opportunity, coupled with the larger ferment of interest in open access publishing, led to the development of BDL.