[open-science] Elsevier (again) and Community Networks

[William Waites]

So even though I'm mostly doing unrelated work at the moment, I've
been involved with community operated rural broadband infrastructure
for a while [1][2]. There's quite some activity around this, and some
friends from Catalunya that came to Edinburgh to visit a while ago are
guest editing a special issue of an Elsevier journal [3].

It would probably be a good thing to write an article for it, and
there are a couple of things I've been meaning to write about for some
time, and it would be nice to have it in a volume together with others
working on similar projects.

But my work on this is unfunded, any money we have is better spent on
and in the community and $2400 fee to have an article made Open Access
is in any case too much in this context.

I bring this up on the list because it is a very strange example that
may become more common of funded academia colliding with community
projects normally done on a shoestring. It is manifestly against the 
ethic of community projects to create closed literature and it is
unreasonable to expect community projects to cough up to subsidise
Elsevier.

So what should I do? Thoughts?

-w

[1] http://www.tegola.org.uk/
[2] http://www.hubs.net.uk/
[3] http://www.journals.elsevier.com/computer-networks/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-community-networks/