The underlying ethos of Open Access is that the public should have the right to free access to the published results of all publicly funded academic and scientific research. Such has been the political success of OA campaigners that some funding agencies (e.g. Wellcome) now make OA publication of funded research a necessary condition for the award of grants. Learned societies and publishers in astronomy are now looking at ways of best implementing OA in varying degrees of rigour. However, OA does not mean costless access: somewhere down the line, somebody has to pay for the added value (professional copyediting and typesetting, presentation, anonymous peer review, etc.) supplied to author manuscripts by learned-society and commercial publishers in the better journals. I take a critical look at the methods of finance employed within astronomical publishing and review the different flavours of OA. I also raise the question of whether it might make more sense to ensure free access to authors rather than to readers.