@danbirman

I don't know why anyone would ever pay journals for open access.

Remember that all NIH-funded research is open access after one year. Is anyone's science that time-critical that it has to be easily-accessible* for that one year.

* You can always send anyone the PDF if they email you. While not everyone knows this, this is generally known within most scientific fields. All open-access is really doing is making it easier to find. It is not making it actually available or not.

Also (if you can't wait a year), there is nothing preventing you from putting the paper on bioRxiv before turning in the final submission to whatever journal this is.