I was pretty sad to hear that some sites are being closed. I understand why it's necessary, though.
But, some of the sites have overlap with other, established sited. TheoreticalPhy.SE and Astro.SE have quite a few questions which would be at home on Phy.SE (first example I found, lots more where that came from.)
There must be other overlaps (Lit.SE and Writers?), where a chunk of the questions are fine on either site. I don't know though, not seen those sites.
Could we, as a joint community (of the sites being closed and the overlap sites) get some time to organize a salvage? Maybe you can make the site migration-only or something after closing.
The only argument against keeping them read-only is that there isn't enough activity to curate/moderate the posts.
That argument is invalid for migrated posts, the communities of the receiving sites can handle the posts. Plus, this will preserve the discoverability of a whole bunch of content.
But it will take time and effort. I'm willing to chip in for the effort, but I need you guys to provide the time.
Update:
Looks like everyone agrees with the salvage :). I'll just keep this as a centralized location for the links. The "Also this" links link to the meta-post on the source site--but those are mainly announcements devoid of discussion (some comments only). Please use the destination site meta to discuss the salvage.
Astro → Physics.SE — A full migration , except for astrophotography (→photography.SE)
TP.SE → Physics.SE — A full migration, except for quantum computing (→cstheory.SE)
TP.SE → cstheory.SE — Partial migration
Lit.SE → Scifi.SE — Partial migration
Lit.SE → Philosophy.SE — Partial migration
Lit.SE → Writers.SE? — Partial migration
Econ.SE → Math.SE / Stats.SE — Partial migration
astro.SE → photography.SE Partial migration (only astrophotography)
Feel free to add more if you find 'em :)
Partial migrations are being done by the site members via flagging. If you are a member of the source/destination site (better to be a member of the destination site), then please join in.
Full migrations are being done by the SE team, here's some more about them. Destination site members need to just sit back and relax (or you can powwow about the whole thing)