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Since the launch of ChemistryOpen in 2011, more and more governments are mandating publicly funded research results to be made available in an open-access form; the main idea being that scientific research should be available to the public free of charge to allow creative and innovative research. The Research Councils UK (RCUK) mandated that from April 1st, 2013 all publications resulting from RCUK-funded research should be made open access. As a result, over 20 UK-based universities have opened a Wiley Open Access account thereby ensuring the funding for their open-access articles published with Wiley and Wiley-VCH. In the US, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) bill, which would require funding agencies to make articles reporting on publicly funded research results freely available, is under ongoing discussion. The EU research and innovation program, Horizon 2020, and governments and agencies in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Belgium, are issuing similar open-access mandates. To comply with these growing government-driven initiatives, authors need to make sure that their research papers are openly accessible, and publishers are responding with a variety of open-access options. As a result, many different publishing models have emerged. Traditional publishing houses offer the option to make selected articles openly accessible in subscription-based journals (hybrid journals), and they have also created new fully open-access journals—typically a fee must be paid and so this is called gold open access, also known as the “author-pays” model. In addition, new open-access publishing houses have been founded, which often cater to a specific institution or society (e.g., eLife or the Beilstein journals). Many universities and institutions have created repositories to make the post-peer-review accepted version accessible after publication (green open access), when permitted by the terms of the publisher license. Unfortunately, so-called “predatory” publishers focusing on high publication numbers and revenue rather than scientific considerations have emerged, and their actions have harmed the term “open access” immensely. This has led to authors feeling insecure about open-access publishing in general. Overall, these different models and players and the increasing pressure from governments to publish open access have led to a very diverse publishing landscape in which a uniform and efficient model for making research accessible to everyone has not yet been found. And, it may well be that the time for a single uniform model has passed. Today, we are faced with a publishing landscape in which everything seems possible.