Abstract
Recently academic publishing has entered in a new era, namely that of open access publishing. This has resulted in the appearance of numerous new open access journals. Scholars who want to publish their work today have endless publishing possibilities to choose from, but who is able to tell them which journal is reliable? This used to be the job of librarians, but with approximately 17000 journals they are no longer able to keep up. For this reason several websites and services have started to gather information about open access journals in order to make an overview of reliable and unreliable journals. One of these services is called Quality Open Access Market (QOAM). In this article six other services (Directory of Open Access Journals, JournalReviewer, SciRev, Journalysis, Journalguide, PRE-val and Eigenfactor) will be compared to QOAM in order to find out which service offers the best results. QOAM is taken as a starting point here because the research presented in this article was commissioned by them (namely: Saskia de Vries and Leo Waaijers) in order to find out what value they can actually add.
Highlights
Since the beginning of the Open Access movement there has been a huge increase in the number of Open Access journals
In the table below a schematic comparison is made between the eight different Open Access journal ranking services that are discussed in this essay: Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), JournalReviewer (JR), SciRev, Journalysis, Journalguide (Jg) PRE-val (PRE), Eigenfactor (Ef) and Quality Open Access Market (QOAM)
Eigenfactor.org does not include all Open Access journals that exist at the moment, while the value for money in QOAM is not based on metrics as it is at Eigenfactor.org
Summary
Since the beginning of the Open Access movement there has been a huge increase in the number of Open Access journals. Most of the scholars who have these concerns did not have experience with Open Access publishing, and many of them were not planning on publishing their work this way in the future One reason for these concerns might still be ignorance, many scholars do not know where or how to find Open Access journals which meet their standards. For this reason there was a need for a service that ranks journals based on quality and value for money. The idea is that librarians, editors, peer reviewers and authors can fill out score cards that together result in a Base Score and a Valuation Score These scores show how high these journals are evaluated by the scorers and are an indicator of quality and value for money. In this essay seven other services will be compared to QOAM
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