8b -- choose five prominent TA journals and calculate the average author-side fee paid by authors in the latest edition (count pages and figures and multiply by relevant charges); compare these fees (which, remember, are levied on top of subscription revenues) with the fees charged by OA journals. - Bill Hooker

8c -- what proportion of OA chemistry journals actually charge any author-side fees? (hint: http://www.sennoma.net/main...) - Bill Hooker

8d -- how many chemistry journals are there? what proportion are TA, and what proportion OA? - Bill Hooker

14d -- find five repositories in which chemistry papers could be deposited; extra credit, find your instructor's papers in OA versions. - Bill Hooker

Bill, you make me happy. :) - D0r0th34

What makes me happy is the thought that the next generation of researchers are going to have taken classes like this one... what price "journal prestige" or "impact factor" in another ten years? :-) - Bill Hooker

moo-hoo-hahahahahahahaha mine is an evil laugh! - D0r0th34

Thanks so much Bill - the students are allowed to choose questions and those you brought up are excellent! We went through this post as an example of using FriendFeed and checked out your feed as the OA guru. - Jean-Claude Bradley

Several students answered during the class - the formatting needs some fixing but I think they are on the right track - if you guys want to comment directly on there just request an account on the wiki. - Jean-Claude Bradley

I've wondered about crowdsourcing some of the research questions from the OAD (http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki...) to undergrad or even high school classes; with a large enough network, you could tackle some really labor-intensive work, like adding copyright policy info to the DOAJ or getting a good representative sample of TA author-side fees. - Bill Hooker

Bill that is a very intriguing suggestion - do you know if once all the answers are in it will be published in some fashion? Are the answers to be added right on the page? - Jean-Claude Bradley

The OAD page is not designed to run the research, just a place to store questions (honestly, mostly a braindump of "questions I'd like answered" for Peter Suber, though I and a few others have added bits and pieces). If someone does run with any of the questions, they are invited to add their project to another OAD page, "research in progress", and any results would also be welcome additions to the same wiki, on existing pages if appropriate or a new page if not. Other forms of publication would be up to the researchers. - Bill Hooker

Bill - I added the OAD page at the top of our FAQ page - hopefully some students will get inspired by some suggested topics and answer - Jean-Claude Bradley