Proteins and Wave Functions: Why I just sent my paper to Journal of Chemical Physics

"The last few years I have published my papers (i.e. the ones where I'm corresponding author) open access as much as possible, but I just sent my latest paper to JCP. Here's why. Why not OA? The paper isn't "impactful" enough for free OA options such as Chemical Science and ACS Central Science. When it comes to impact-neutral journals my main consideration is price. My go-to journal in the past has been PeerJ where I purchased a life-time membership years ago. My two co-authors also have memberships so we could have published the article for free. Unfortunately, the current paper is not "bio enough" for PeerJ. It's also not "organic" enough for Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry (which is free) and it doesn't fall in to any of the categories for Living Journal of Computational Molecular Science ($100). The next-most cheapest options are ACS Omega ($750) or RSC Advances (£500 ≈ $670). When I published in ACS Omega earlier this year I discovered that you still sign away copyright to the ACS who then graciously agrees to publish it under an CC license if you pay them $750! In my book that's not OA and I don't think I'll publish there again. I was all set to send it to RSC Advances but a few months ago I discovered that the RSC is engaging in the sort of behaviour I would normally expect from Elsevier. I don't see why I should support the RSC with an additional £500. That's the only journals I know of with APCs less than $1000 and I simply don't have that kind of money to spend on publications right now. Why JCP? In March 2016, AIP Publishing switched to a new publishing agreement where authors retain copyright but give the AIP an exclusive licence to publish. As a copyright owner you are allowed to, for example 1. Reprint portions of the Work (excerpts, figures, tables) in future works created by the Author, in keeping with professional publication ethics...."