In January 2026, our new annual membership fee tier takes effect. The new tier is US$200 for member organisations that operate on publishing revenue or expenses (whichever is higher) of up to US$1,000 annually. We announced the Board’s decision, making it possible in July, and––as you can infer from Amanda’s latest blog––this is the first such change to the annual membership fee tiers in close to 20 years!
The new fee tier resulted from the consultation process and fees review undertaken as part of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability program, carried out with the help of our Membership and Fees Committee (made up of representatives from member organisations and community partners). The program is ongoing, and the new fee tier, intended to make Crossref membership more accessible, is one of the first changes it helped us determine.
It has been 18 (!) years since Crossref last deprecated a metadata schema. In that time, we’ve released numerous schema versions, some major updates, and some interim releases that never saw wide adoption. Now, with 27 different schemas to support, we believe it’s time to streamline and move forward.
Starting next year, we plan to begin the process of deprecating lightly-used schemas, with the understanding that this will be a multi-year effort involving careful planning and plenty of communication.
Scholarly metadata, deposited by thousands of our members and made openly available can act as “trust signals” for the publications. It provides information that helps others in the community to verify and assess the integrity of the work. Despite having a central responsibility in ensuring the integrity of the work that they publish, editorial teams tend not be fully aware of the value of metadata for integrity of the scholarly record. How can we change that?
Crossref was created back in 2000 by 12 forward-thinking scholarly publishers from North America and Europe, and by 2002, these members had registered 4 million DOI records. At the time of writing, we have over 23,600 members in 164 different countries. Half of our members are based in Asia, and 35% are universities or scholar-led. These members have registered over 176 million open metadata records with DOIs (as of today). What a difference 25 years makes!
In our 25th anniversary year, I thought it would be time to take a look at how we got here. And so—hold tight—we’re going to go on an adventure through space and time1, stopping every 5 years through Crossref history to check in on our members. And we’re going to see some really interesting changes over the years.
In 2022, we flagged up some changes to Similarity Check, which were taking place in v2 of Turnitin’s iThenticate tool used by members participating in the service. We noted that further enhancements were planned, and want to highlight some changes that are coming very soon. These changes will affect functionality that is used by account administrators, and doesn’t affect the Similarity Reports themselves.
From Wednesday 3 May 2023, administrators of iThenticate v2 accounts will notice some changes to the interface and improvements to the Users, Groups, Integrations, Statistics and Paper Lookup sections.
Logging in
iThenticate v2 account administrators and browser users will see a new login page when logging in to iThenticate v2:
A refreshed interface
Once logged in to iThenticate v2, account administrators will see an updated design, with improved notifications to let them know whether a task/action has been successfully completed or not.
Users
There will be improvements to the user management system for account administrators, including a much clearer navigation menu for managing active, pending and deactivated users.
There will also be a filtering option on the Users page to search for active, pending and deactivated users by first name, last name, email address, group and date added. In addition coloured labels will be introduced to easily identify the level of access (or ‘Role’) for each user.
An improved bulk user import process will be available, with clearer guidance on any issues that may arise during the upload. This new development will also include new screens for adding and editing users with more notifications to help prevent mistakes.
Integrations
For account administrators managing peer review management system integrations and needing to generate API keys, the Integrations page will be improved to make copying API keys simpler.
Statistics
iThenticate v2 administrators will also notice some improvements to the Statistics page. Usage data should load faster and will be sortable by user group. They will also be able to generate large usage reports of over 100k submissions.
Paper lookup
The Paper lookup will allow iThenticate v2 account administrators to find submissions that have been made from any integration connected to their iThenticate v2 account. They can be found by searching the paper ID (or oid number) of the submission.
Please note: the ability to search for submissions by the user’s name is available for manuscripts submitted via the iThenticate v2 website only and not for papers submitted via an integration.
New password requirements
To improve the security of users’ accounts, new password requirements will be introduced, including a minimum of 8 symbols, 1 special symbol, 1 upper case letter, and 1 number.
Next in iThenticate v2
Turnitin, who produce iThenticate, are currently working on a number of new features and developments including an improved similarity report, paraphrase and AI writing detection. A detailed timeline is not yet available but we’ll be updating you on these new developments in the coming months.
✏️ Do get in touch via support@crossref.org if you have any questions about iThenticate v1 or v2 or start a discussion by commenting on this post below.
