There are few open access journals in my field, and the ones that will publish open access charge absurdly high fees for it. I have a spreadsheet for my field:

There are few open access journals in my field, and the ones that will publish open access charge absurdly high fees for it. I have a spreadsheet for my field: $2000 to $3140 per article, average $2690. I tried to negotiate with one smaller and more specialized journal in my field on the fee without any luck. I've also tried to find journals willing to take my paper without copyright transfer, as if commonly done for US government employees, but few journals seem willing to do that without the law requiring it. My solution at the moment: Publish only in conferences that don't require you to transfer copyright so I can distribute my paper open access without paying anything. Yes, the peer review, if there is any, is less rigorous, but my experience suggests that peer review typically offers only shallow critiques of my work. Peer review doesn't need to work that way, but that's how it is in practice at the moment. I think review is valuable, but this makes getting good reviews my responsibility, not a publishing venue's. This solution also precludes me from working in most tenure-track academic positions, but I believe those positions are a bad deal anyway, so I'm not too worried. Government research positions seem usually okay with publishing mainly in conferences. If there are any other issues with this scheme, I'm interested in hearing about them. I'm against subsidizing open access publication as that seems to basically be a subsidy for publishers and not researchers. That would maintain the absurdly high open access feeds. Instead, let's make the journals compete on price, and they'll have to compete against free (e.g., Arxiv), so hopefully this would drive the prices down to a reasonable level. I'm fine with paying publishers if they actually provide a service commensurate with what they charge. The issue is that they don't right now.