How to find the money for an Open Access publication fee, if you're a postdoc and you don't have any funds? Last year I finished my PhD in Europe and now I'm a postdoc in North America. I work on computer science.

An year ago I wrote a paper with my former Europen supervisor and a former colleague, and submitted it to a conference. My former supervisor presented the work at the conference.

Now we just discovered that the steering committee selected our paper for a post-conference supplement in a Open Access BMC journal. We're very happy for this selection (they chose 5 papers out of 52) but there's a problem: we don't have funding to pay the ~2,000 euros publication fee for the journal.

My former supervisor has no funding at the moment; my former colleague is still a PhD student and he's broke; myself I'm a postdoc with no research funding and I'm not going to ask to my current supervisor to pay (because I don't think it's fair and anyway he'd refuse).

What should I do?

That journal publication would be very important for my career, and quite useful for our scientific community. This supplement is a very unique occasion.
I see several routes to proceed, in the order in which I would suggest that you attempt them:


Check if your former or current institution has an organizational affiliation with the journal that will allow you to publish there for free (i.e., the OA version of a subscription).
Ask your current supervisor.  They might be willing to pay despite not being an author, provided that you list you current affiliation as well as your former (which is generally reasonable to do).
Many universities now have an open access "slush fund" to help deal with situations like these.  Check with the department leadership and the libraries at both your current and former departments and see if there is such a fund.
Contact the journal and explain the situation: they may be willing to waive the fee.
Publish the paper in a "traditional" journal that has no fee.