When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organizations around the world, representing 148 countries.
As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organizations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all.
In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful.
Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery.
Preprints have become an important tool for rapidly communicating and iterating on research outputs. There is now a range of preprint servers, some subject-specific, some based on a particular geographical area, and others linked to publishers or individual journals in addition to generalist platforms. In 2016 the Crossref schema started to support preprints and since then the number of metadata records has grown to around 16,000 new preprint DOIs per month.
TL;DR One of the things that makes me glad to work at Crossref is the principles to which we hold ourselves, and the most public and measurable of those must be the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, or POSI, for short. These ambitions lay out how we want to operate - to be open in our governance, in our membership and also in our source code and data. And it’s that openness of source code that’s the reason for my post today - on 26th September 2022, our first collaboration with the JSON Forms open-source project was released into the wild.
Crossref’s Similarity Check service is used by our members to detect text overlap with previously published work that may indicate plagiarism of scholarly or professional works. Manuscripts can be checked against millions of publications from other participating Crossref members and general web content using the iThenticate text comparison software from Turnitin.
The 2000 members who already make use of Similarity Check upload almost 2,000,000 documents each month to look for matching text in other publications.
We have some great news for those 2000 members –– a completely new version of iThenticate is on its way, and will start to roll out to users in the coming months.
New functionality has been developed based on your feedback over the past few years and includes:
An improved Document Viewer that makes PDFs searchable and accessible, with responsive design for ease of use on different screen sizes. All of the functionality of the Viewer and the Text-only reports in the previous version have been streamlined into just two views: Sources Overview and All Sources.
Improved exclusion options to make refining matches even easier. Smarter citation detection now identifies probable citations both inline and in reference sections.
A new “Content Portal” where you can see what percentage of your own content has been successfully indexed for the iThenticate comparison database, and download reports of indexing errors that need to be fixed.
A new API for integration with manuscript submission systems allows display of the largest matching word count and the top 5 source matches alongside the Similarity Score.
The maximum number of pages and file size per document has been doubled to 800 pages/200 MB.
The new document viewer in iThenticate v2.0
Improved reference exclusion
Crossref members can use Similarity Check directly by logging in, or via an integration with a submission/peer review system. We are working with many system providers to bring v2.0 to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, we are looking for members to help us test the new system directly in the iThenticate user interface. If you are interested and can spare a few hours some time in the next month please let me know.
And if your organization is not yet using Similarity Check to assess the originality of the manuscripts you receive do take a look at the many benefits the service has to offer.
