If you can't publish, how can they make you perish? Bias against marine conservation papers in scientific journals

As a semi-reformed oceanographer and marine scientist, I still read scientific publications regularly. I even manage to sneak in a paper or talk to a professional meeting every couple of years. And right now, this situation hits home because I'm trying to write a conservation oriented paper for scientific publication that might (over a decade late) get the major portion of my Master's thesis published:

the environmental situation in the marine environment is pretty dire in many respects, and publishing biases exacerbates the problem – getting good science-based management and decision-making that can alleviate marine environmental problems is made even more difficult if timely publication of essential science is prevented by the biases of journal editors.

Part of the problem for me - as someone working in a science agency at HQ - is I don't take data anymore.  This means that if I want to write, and i do, I have to lean on policy or management topics that allow me to synthesize the work of others or to draw out my own small data sets into new and interesting way.  Marine conservation topics - which often cross what used to be a hard boundary between process or characterization studies and applied management of natural resources - are right up the alley that's open to me right now.

Funny thing is I would have thought that the rise of on-line open access journals would have begun to ameliorate this. Perhaps I'll write about that as a paper topic someday - assuming i can find a publisher.