Looks like people are already warming up for tomorrow's Open Access Day. In the Guardian, Richard Smith pens a column on Springer's acquisition of BioMed Central, which he says may turn out to be a pivotal moment in the history of scientific publishing. "I'm no seer, but it became obvious to me in the mid-90s, when ... I was the chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group, that the transition to open access would have to happen," he writes. "Once all of science is open access – as it surely will be eventually – then the value of our scientific deposits may be greatly increased." He says that traditional publishers "subtract value by Balkanising the research."
In other open access events, Peter Suber reports that "Google and a group of publishers may be close to settling the publishers' lawsuit against the Google Library Project," the company's initiative of scanning books on library shelves and making them accessible online.