In a somewhat strange move, Microsoft Research is going to sponsor BioMed Central 2007 Research Awards.

Lee Dirks, director, scholarly communications, Microsoft Research: “We are very supportive of the open science movement and recognize that open access publication is an important component of overall scholarly communications.”

I hope the other Microsoft divisions are going to follow this move and sponsor (or release their products as) Open Source and free software projects … More details on the announcement here.

• Open Access