December 2002 The Public Library of Science receives a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for open access publishing and announces its first two open access journals. (press release)
March 2003 NHS announces membership deal with BioMed Central (BMJ news story)
June 2003 Joint Information Systems Committee (a committee of the further and higher education funding bodies) buys institutional memberships of BioMed Central for all 180 universities in the UK. (BMJ news story)
June 2003 Release of Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, with suggestions as to what institutions, funding agencies, libraries, publishers, and scientists could do to bring it about
June 2003 Martin Sabo introduces the Public Access to Science Act into Congress, which would exclude from copyright protection works resulting from scientific research substantially funded by the US government.
September 2003 Howard Hughes Medical Institute tells grantees that the institute will cover article processing charges for open access
October 2003 Publication by the Wellcome Trust of Economic analysis of scientific publishing and a position statement in support of open access publishing
October 2003 Public Library of Science launches its first open-access journal, PLoS Biology
October 2003 Release of Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
October 2003 Financial analysts at BNP Paribas and Citigroup Smith Barney independently concluded that the business model of open access publishing is viable and is likely to put pressure on commercial publishers (story)
December 2003 JISC announces a £150 000 funding programme to help publishers make journals freely available on the internet using open access models.
December 2003 Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons announces an inquiry into access to journals within the scientific community, with particular reference to price and availability.
December 2003 World Summit on the Information Society (co-sponsored by the UN and the International Telecommunications Union) endorses open access in its declaration of principles and plan of action
More details are available from Peter Suber’s Timeline of the Open Access Movement
and PubMed Central’s page on Open Access Publishing