How to select an Open Access journal? | Be openly accessible or be obscure

"I was recently asked by a colleague about Open Access (OA) journals. Her interests are in the areas of cancer and medical genetics. She’d had unfortunate recent experiences with anonymous peer review, and wished to find a suitable OA journal that uses open peer review – with: a)  identification of the reviewers, and b) publication of their reviews. After responding with a few suggestions, I subsequently thought that a somewhat more extensive exploration of selected relevant  journals might be of wider interest. If one isn’t very familiar with OA journals, then one needs to be cautious about selecting one. For authors in the biomedical area, it’s preferable that the journal be indexed in PubMed, the widely-used bibliographic database. A convenient way to check this is to enter the full name of the journal into the PubMed Single Citation Matcher. Another valuable source of information is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which “aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content“. Although the DOAJ includes information about over 9,000 OA journals, it’s able to provide only a very limited amount of information about each one. A useful listing of cancer-related journals is the Oncology, cancer research section of the Free medical journals site. While many of these journals permit immediate free access, some only permit embargoed access. I’ve put together some information about a selected set of 15 OA journals. The focus is mainly, but not entirely, on ones that will consider articles about medical genetics and/or cancer. A few provide open peer review. Of these, two that I suggested to my colleague were #1 (BMC Medicine) and #3 (BMJ Open) ..."