S witzerland may be a small country, but it has a complex academic landscape. Research and teaching is conducted in several languages: the official state languages French, German, Italian, and Romansh, plus English as the academic lingua franca. Higher educational institutions (HEIs) range from international giants such as the ETH Zurich to specialized, cantonal institutions such as the Bern University of Teacher Education. There are private research facilities, a wide variety of funders, academies, societies, and colleges, not to forget the international research hub, CERN, in Geneva that may be housed on Swiss soil but is considered a European institution. This lively and heterogeneous academic landscape exists within a political context that is also complex: Switzerland is a fiercely federal country, and the twenty-six cantons conduct their affairs-including their academic culture with its laws and customs-with a considerable degree of independence from each other as well as from the federal umbrella in Bern.It is therefore remarkable that in 2018 Switzerland rolled out a national open access policy, according to which all taxpayer-funded research will be made available in open access by 2024. 1 This decision continues to have significant repercussions on all levels of academic endeavors, not least for the institutions who are faced with the task of providing the framework for turning nationwide open access into a practical and practicable reality. The deadline is close, so it is worth taking stock. This article sketches out the institutional landscape of open access in Switzerland with a particular focus on academic libraries, before pointing to some current concerns regarding its development. It will close with a brief look at what lies ahead.