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After a few decades in traditional science publishing, I got involved in the early days of open access publishing at BioMed Central (BMC), one of the very first large scale and exclusive open access science publishers. In my role as director of BMC I also participated, in 2001 in Budapest, in a meeting which resulted in the Budapest Open Access Initiative and a formal definition of “open access”. At a later stage I advocated the concept of open access publishing among the traditional publishers as well, resulting in a take-up of he idea at Springer, where I served as director of open access for a while, before moving on to working on ‘nanopublications’ and semantic concept analysis in scientific journal literature. Although formally retired now, I still serve, on an ad hoc basis, as advisor to several initiatives and companies on matters pertaining to open access and regularly give talks on the subject.