Miranda and others - the American Society for Microbiology has many journals including the Biology Education, publication is free except for Open Access, but you may post them yourself.  Membership is the requirement and yes $22 is not much, but maybe I can ask to support you as a Global Outreach member.  The journal will do a fair and thorough review of your submission and if it is 'ok' they will publish.  But regardless of their acceptance decision they will give you great feedback and thus you will have a much better paper after their review.  This society is an example of a specialty scientific society who publishes broadly and is known for quality.

Dear Prof, this is a journal that would pay us to publish our paper, if our research happens to be about Malaria.  (They happen to have a funding agency.)

"Most open-access (OA) journals make money by making authors pay an article processing charge to publish a paper. A small online malaria journal based in the Netherlands wants to turn that situation on its head. It is promising to pay authors €150 for every article it publishes from now on. The idea behind the move—possible thanks to a Dutch funding agency—is not only to lure authors to the journal, but also to drive home the message that academic publishing is way too expensive, says the journal's editor, Bart Knols."

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/need-cash-publish-your-paper-malariaworld-journal

Dear Sir,

It is up to the Institution supporting the journal. If journal has enough funds through external source then no need to charge. Otherwise xml conversion, graphics editing, website management, printing require a numerous amount of money. Chief Editor Nepal Journal of Epidemiology. 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/2851/

Thanks, both.

 I can see that there are special cases. In general, the costs have to fall somewhere, and most OA journals offering free publication are probably suspicious. Interesting that there are only two answers. 

MDPI is an interesting publisher with a base in Switzerland.  When it begins a new journal it does not charge an APC, but after a good number of articles it charges 300 Swiss francs, then 600, and then for the strong journals with good indexing it can get expensive.  But it still is below the cost of many publishers which seem to have variable standards in their journals, such as BioMed Central.

Another new and interesting publisher is PeerJ which charges a one-time membership fee from $199 to $399 and you can then publish continuously based on your plan without any additional charges (see link).  They are indexed in PubMed and currently have Bio/med and computer journals.  They also have a prePeerJ where you can post before peer review for a variety of reasons.  Worth looking into.

Thanks, Robert

This info may be useful to many. I can see that some publishers may be going for a strategy of encouraging submissions for free to build up a readership and set of contributors, then starting to charge when they think the market will bear it

when we published Acta Zoologica Lithuanica, institution paid all costs, and we in fact were OA journal. 

Thank you, Linas,

Now I have heard of a few other journals where an institution or government ministry pays for the costs of the journal, enabling it to be OA. Although I am sure there are problems (as with anything) that might develop here, it seems like a positive step. One problem is that when institutions or governments have money problems, the provision may be axed, regardless of the usefulness of the journal concerned.

Another good option is to look into societies, many of them have little or no costs for publication and many are now going to OA.  In the U.S. there are many state Academies of Science and these now frequently have OA and free publication.  Some national organization may as well, or subject area societies.  For State Academies, you do not have to live in the state, though I do suggest that scientists should join and support several professional societies.

@Robert JW, thanks for the link you sent to me. But it requires some payment. Ljubomir advised me to go for the cheapest possible USD 22. But will it mean that if my papers are OK, they will publish?  I cannot attend conferences, just can't get time off work.

Are there other links for Biology education lectures, where else can I send a paper?

Miranda and others - the American Society for Microbiology has many journals including the Biology Education, publication is free except for Open Access, but you may post them yourself.  Membership is the requirement and yes $22 is not much, but maybe I can ask to support you as a Global Outreach member.  The journal will do a fair and thorough review of your submission and if it is 'ok' they will publish.  But regardless of their acceptance decision they will give you great feedback and thus you will have a much better paper after their review.  This society is an example of a specialty scientific society who publishes broadly and is known for quality.

Thanks very much Robert JW.  Please make a request for me as a Global Outreach member.  The best thing is "journal will do a fair and thorough review of your submission and if it is 'ok' they will publish.  But regardless of their acceptance decision they will give you great feedback and thus you will have a much better paper after their review. "  My local journals do a good review, but they ask of me the same service, to review the works of other authors.  I learn a lot too, from reviewing!

Dear Robert, yet another examples for your collection of free OA journals are: North-Western Journal of Zoology (Romanian, JCR list), and Biological Letters (Polish, non-JCR list, however it was founded at A. Mickiewicz University and it is not predatory journal). I think both of them has some support from government.

As to your concern about funding in case of foundation/gov financial problems, I think we should look at things like crowdfunding for support of OA journals.

All the best