This blog post is from Lettie Conrad and Michelle Urberg, cross-posted from the The Scholarly Kitchen.
As sponsors of this project, we at Crossref are excited to see this work shared out.
The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.
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.
Not sure if you’re using iThenticate v1 or iThenticate v2? More here.
Not sure whether you’re an account administrator? Find out here.
Private Repository - ScholarOne only
The Submitted Works repository (or Private Repository) is a new feature in iThenticate v2. The only MTS that currently integrates with this feature is ScholarOne. This feature allows users to find similarity not just across Turnitin’s extensive Content Database but also across all previous manuscripts submitted to your iThenticate account for all the journals you work on. This would allow you to find collusion between authors or potential cases of duplicate submissions.
How does this work?
You have received a manuscript from Author 1 and have decided to index this manuscript into your Submitted Works repository. At some point later you receive a new manuscript from Author 2. When generating your Similarity Report, you have decided to check against your Submitted Works repository. There is a paragraph in the manuscript from Author 2 which matches a paragraph in the manuscript from Author 1. This would be highlighted within your Similarity Report as a match against your Submitted Works repository.
By clicking on this match you can see the full text of the submission you’ve matched against:
And details about the submission, such as the name and email address of the user who submitted it, the date it was submitted and the title of the submission:
The ability to see the full source text and the details can both be switched off individually.
Setting up the Submitted Works repository
If you are using a third party integration then you should have options inside your MTS when setting up your configuration with iThenticate to decide whether submissions will be indexed to the Submitted Works repository and whether generated Similarity Reports will match against the Submitted Works.
Important: This feature means that sensitive data could be shared between different journals using your iThenticate account
The Submitted Works repository is shared across your entire iThenticate account. This means regardless of whether a submission was made natively from the iThenticate website or through an integration, all Similarity Reports which match against the Submitted Works repository will potentially match against any submissions which were indexed within it. This means that an editor working on one journal may be able to view submissions for another journal. If you are worried about giving your users access to sensitive data, we recommend switching this functionality off.
Submitted Works repository FAQs
Q. How much does this feature cost to use?
This feature comes free with every v2 account.
Q. How many submissions can I index to my private repository?
There is no limit to the number of submissions you can index.
Q. Can I delete submissions from my private repository?
Yes. An Administrator can find and delete a submission using the Paper Lookup Tool. Go to Turnitin’s help documentation for more information.
Page owner: Kathleen Luschek | Last updated 2022-July-15
