I do this as well. I am following so many shows from a year behind that it really isn't a big deal anymore. I have a lot of TV to watch on disc, so much that I have trouble watching it all before the next season is done. The only problem is avoiding spoilers, and since I've read A Song of Ice and FIre that really isn't a problem for me.

Libraries will eventually save money in this situation. Even if libraries paid the open access fee for all faculty, they would only be covering the costs necessary for their institution. Currently, libraries have to pay for bundled journal packages. So, if faculty need access to a particular journals, the library often has to pay a fee that is not justified for access to the required journals, and the providers justify this by bundling other journals with popular or renowned journals.

If academia moves to open-access journals, then everyone would be paying for their own contributions, and faculty would have access to everything they need. I suppose some libraries responsible for faculty who are active publishers may have their fees increase, but I'm not sure if that would be the case. I think the subscription prices set by providers are higher than the publishing costs of open-access journals. At least for the ones I've seen. I've seen open-access submission prices between $1,500 and $2,500. The faculty that teaches me is a small faculty with about 50 part-time and full-time faculty. If they each published 5 articles a year, that is $625,000 a year. I'm not sure what a reasonable amount of publishing is, but now that I look at it that is a lot of money. I don't know what it costs to get access to the various journal subscriptions used by my faculty, but I would be surprised if it was that much money. We have about 600 students in the various programs run by the faculty, which is about $1,800,000 worth of tuition per semester from the students contribution alone. Again, I don't know what amount the government provides after that. I doubt using 1/3rd of student tuition for publishing is feasible, but I'm not sure about that. Hmmm. Certainly, the library's budget will not be that large. I suppose, this system would favour institutions that do not publish as much. I feel that this benefits students in the end, but I guess I'm not sure any more if it would be cheaper. I am in a Master of Library and Information Science program. I'll ask around at school, and see if I can find out how much a typical journal bundle costs.

The kicker is these two universities already pay for access to the majority of articles used by students via their database subscriptions. Access Copyright is charging for a lot of content to which the universities already have access.

The $29.95 is for your commitment as a patron. That will get you a PDF. If you want a print version you will have to buy a copy via Lulu. At least that is how it was done. I think they may license the final copies to Paizo for retail sales. I haven't been in a project for a few months now and things have changed a fair bit recently.

Open Design has been running patronage projects for role playing games for many years now. There system works very well. People can pay for various levels of commitment which gives them various levels of input into the design of the adventure or world being created. I'm a big fan of their work, and it has provided Open Design with a solid customer base. This is a list of recent stuff going on with them. And, here is a list of their current projects. If you are interested in chatting about this process, their forums are fairly active.

I'm not sure if the form validation is such a great idea. Sure, it will save a lot of time and headache, but there is nothing stoping unscrupulous and technically knowledgeable people from sending whatever data they want to the web server. I guess 99% of the time if you use client side validation you'll be ok, but I would feel obliged to still check everything on the server side. I guess having the specific form elements to validate email addresses and constrict dates is very nice. I suppose it doesn't hurt anything to have those new elements, as long as sever side validation doesn't get forgotten about.