Open access journals

So, I have been searching about open-access journals and what do they actually do? They are journals distributing peer-reviewed research literature for free of cost. Initially, I was a bit confused; gee, I get always my journal articles free. But when I thought about it, I remembered, I had to login using my VT ID and I realized that Virginia Tech has a journal subscription because of which I could read them freely. I wondered how do small colleges and research institutes are able to cope up with large subscription costs of these journals and are there any open-access journals in my field?

Unfortunately, the closest I found something to an open-acess journal was Flow,Turbulence and Combustion. This journal publishes research that contributes to providing solutions to problems seen in single-phase/multiphase/reacting flow situation. These papers often discuss experimental or numerical solutions to these problems. The impact factor is 2.305.

This Springer journal is a ‘hybrid journal’- authors can choose if they want o make their articles Open-Access. While the journal highlights that they will “increase the number of articles we publish OA, with the eventual goal of becoming a fully Open Access journal”. The article processing charges for an open-access paper is however, 3280 dollars. This fee is paid by the author to make their article open acess. I understand now why many researchers avoid making their journals papers open access. The fee is extremely huge- imagine waiting for reviewers to accept your paper and then paying again (this time in money). And it would be understandable that you need a fee to maintain the website and maintain the database but this seems like a huge amount. This would discourage researchers who have done some pretty good research but don’t have the financial resources to make their papers open access. This seems contrary to the path of being an open access journal fully because it is dissuading researchers to make their papers open access.