The CrossCheck pilot has now ended and the CrossCheck service will officially launch in June 2008, as announced in our recent press release and covered in such publications as the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“CrossCheck powered by iThenticate” is a new initiative from CrossRef to help the scholarly publishers verify the originality of submitted manuscripts.

How do publishers participate? By:

1. signing a participation agreement that includes terms and conditions that have been vetted by CrossRef.  Publishers are at liberty to negotiate the terms of this agreement with iParadigms if needed; if you accept the terms as is, iParadigms will countersign promptly and begin the process of crawling your content. To request the template agreement, please contact Gabe Boucher (gboucher@crossref.org)
2. allowing their content to be crawled and text-fingerprinted by iParadigms for inclusion in the CrossCheck database. This is associated with a small administrative fee to CrossRef. You may request pricing information from Gabe Boucher (gboucher@crossref.org)
3. submitting documents which they wish to check for plagiarism for comparison against the CrossCheck database and against, if they so choose, the open web. This is associated with per-document submission fees, tiered to the volume of documents checked each year (see Appendix A of the service agreement)

What is the CrossCheck database?

The CrossCheck database is the aggregation of full-text works made available for indexing by CrossCheck participating publishers. When you submit documents for checking, you will be able to indicate whether you would like to check against just this database or, in addition, against all internet content.

What is the definition of document?

Documents submitted for checking are defined to be article or chapter length works of no more than 50 pages. Note that documents submitted for checking do not get stored or included in the database and can be deleted at your request.

Important points: Note that you can participate by including your content in the CrossCheck database without undertaking to check your own submissions if you so choose. All CrossRef members are encouraged to contribute to the CrossCheck database regardless of whether they decide to check submissions at this time. The initiative will only be as successful as it is robust, and the administrative fee for participation will go down as more members join. Because of the way we have structured the administrative fee -- it will be charged in arrears, at year end, and will be calculated based on the level of overall publisher participation -- we anticipate the administrative charge working out to be less than the full 20%. How much less will depend on the number of members we manage to sign up for CrossCheck this year.