QOAM /kju:əʊm/ abbr. Quality Open Access Marker. QOAM is a market place for scientific and scholarly journals which publish articles in open access.
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It is important to realise that ‘quality’ in the context of QOAM relates to the quality of a journal’s service to authors, rather than to a hypothesized quality of a journal’s scientific and scholarly content as based on citation metrics.
In QOAM, academic authors score the experience they have had with the journal’s peer review and editorial board from 1 to 5 via a concise journal score card. The QoS indicator of a journal is then defined as the product of the average score of the journal and the ‘robustness’ of this score.
The robustness relates the number N of score cards to the number A of articles (read DOIs) of the journal, both measured over the same period of time. As the number of articles of a journal varies widely, some logarithmic scaling is used to bring the result within scope. Journals with less than 10 articles are left aside. The time period is a moving window over the current year and the previous two years.
The actual formula for the robustness is: 1 + log (N/log A), with A ≥ 10.
In QOAM, the publication fee of a journal is found behind the tab ‘Price information’ on the detail page of a journal under the respective headings ‘List price’ and ‘Institutional deal’. The first one is gathered from the journal’s web site; information about institutional discounts comes from licence brokers, like SURFmarket, publishers or libraries.
QOAM is a free service, based on academic crowd sourcing. QOAM uses no cookies and can be visited anonymously. Conversely, author reviews in QOAM are named.
In order to publish a score card in QOAM one has to log in via one’s institutional email address. In practice this means that QOAM collects the names and institutional email addresses of the reviewers. No other information is collected. The names are used to sign the score cards and are publicly visible. An author’s institutional email address, however, is only shown to other authors of score cards. No other uses of these data are foreseen.
Underlying this policy are the views that (1) anonymous score cards are prone to misuse and should be avoided in QOAM and (2) authors of score cards should be able to contact each other for dialogue.
Finally, QOAM uses the https protocol for secure exchange of data. QOAM data are stored in the Netherlands and governed by Dutch c.q. European law.