17 Quality Open Access Market

This year we wish to present QOAM (www.qoam.eu) to the LIBER Annual Conference for a second time. QOAM’s mission remains unchanged: ‘Quality Open Access Market is primarily for authors who want to publish their article in open access in a high quality journal and for a reasonable price’, but during the past year QOAM’s development has made considerable progress.

The Journal Score Card has been divided into two separate cards: the Base Score Card and the Valuation Score Card. The Base Score Card analyses the transparency of a journal’s web site and might be completed mainly by libraries wishing to resume their professional role in journal quality control, a role that was lost in the big deal licenses. The Valuation Score Card shares author experiences with a journal. The combination of both scores constitutes a journal’s SWOT matrix, resulting in four journal categories: Strong and Weaker journals, those which are a Threat (to authors) and journals which are an Opportunity (to publishers).

On the price information side, QOAM already collected publication fees as quoted on a journal’s website (via the Base Score Card) and the real price as paid by an author (via the Valuation Score Card). As a new step, QOAM now also gives the discounts that authors get if their institution has settled an OA licence with a publisher. In the Netherlands, for example, this information is provided to QOAM by SURFmarket, the national licencing agency.

Finally, we succeeded in simplifying our log in procedure. QOAM now follows the same system as that used by the popular ResearchGate network; an institutional email address is all you need. Thus QOAM combines ease of access with a limitation to the academic world for publishing Journal Score Cards.

QOAM is an academic self-help instrument that fully depends on the contributions of libraries, authors and journal editors. It is independent of publishers although a growing list of publishers have included their OA and hybrid journals in QOAM for academic judgement. Today QOAM has 17,000+ journals waiting to be scored.

QOAM should become the meeting point where ‘shopping authors’ can select a journal to publish their article in; publishers may find out how to improve their journal and funders; and policy makers, journalists and the public at large can enter a transparent academic publishing environment. For that, QOAM has to go viral like the H-index, ReseachGate or Wikipedia. The aim of our presentation is to achieve just that.