As many othes, I find myself in the position that my funding agency mandates some form of parallel publishing (or preferably OpenAccess) (as well as an Open Access policy from my university itself).
I've been reading through what author rights i retain with different publishers, and among the big ones very little rights are retained.
Elsevier allows preprints to be published only if it is voluntary. That is, they intentionally prohibit mandated parallel publishing to protect their profit.
Wiley had different rights with different journals, but my first hand choice simply didn't allow parallel publishing of any kind ever.
Springer was the most permissive of all of them, and allows for preprints followed by delayed parallel publication of the accepted manuscript. This would have worked for my current funding, but in the future, even that would not work (e.g. The Swedish Research Council will start to require CC-BY licenses).
Am I just naive in thinking that the hefty ~$3000 OA pricetag on Springer/Wiley/Elsevier is to expensive?
Looking through DOAJ for suitable journals is a bit depressing. More then half of them are obscure university homepages. The few that seems somewhat promising I test by a google scholar search. If I can't search the journal there, I dismiss it.
I'm essentially left with Hindawi journals.
Most of them are brand new, with only 1-2 articles published so far, so the only thing I have to judge those journals are the titles themselves. The "About" pages are such vague descriptions it's meaningless. It doesn't give a very good impression.
For the field of computational mechanics:
Are any of you involved as reviewers or editors for OA journals? Could you recommend some OA journals (with a publication cost < $1500)?