This year, metadata development is one of our key priorities and we’re making a start with the release of version 5.4.0 of our input schema with some long-awaited changes. This is the first in what will be a series of metadata schema updates.
What is in this update?
Publication typing for citations
This is fairly simple; we’ve added a ‘type’ attribute to the citations members supply. This means you can identify a journal article citation as a journal article, but more importantly, you can identify a dataset, software, blog post, or other citation that may not have an identifier assigned to it. This makes it easier for the many thousands of metadata users to connect these citations to identifiers. We know many publishers, particularly journal publishers, do collect this information already and will consider making this change to deposit citation types with their records.
Every year we release metadata for the full corpus of records registered with us, which can be downloaded for free in a single compressed file. This is one way in which we fulfil our mission to make metadata freely and widely available. By including the metadata of over 165 million research outputs from over 20,000 members worldwide and making them available in a standard format, we streamline access to metadata about scholarly objects such as journal articles, books, conference papers, preprints, research grants, standards, datasets, reports, blogs, and more.
Today, we’re delighted to let you know that Crossref members can now use ROR IDs to identify funders in any place where you currently use Funder IDs in your metadata. Funder IDs remain available, but this change allows publishers, service providers, and funders to streamline workflows and introduce efficiencies by using a single open identifier for both researcher affiliations and funding organizations.
As you probably know, the Research Organization Registry (ROR) is a global, community-led, carefully curated registry of open persistent identifiers for research organisations, including funding organisations. It’s a joint initiative led by the California Digital Library, Datacite and Crossref launched in 2019 that fulfills the long-standing need for an open organisation identifier.
We began our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organizations in the world’s least economically advantaged countries. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country; our list of countries is predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA). Eligible members pay no membership or content registration fees. The list undergoes periodic reviews, as countries may be added or removed over time as economic situations change.
To work out which version you’re on, take a look at the website address that you use to access iThenticate. If you go to ithenticate.com then you are using v1. If you use a bespoke URL, https://crossref-[your member ID].turnitin.com/ then you are using v2.
Within a folder, the Documents tab shows all the submitted documents for that folder.
Each document submitted generates a Similarity Report after the document has been through the Similarity Check. If more documents are present than can be displayed at once, the pages feature will appear beneath the documents - click the page number to display, or click Next to move to the next page of documents.
zip file upload - to submit a zip file containing multiple documents, up to a maximum of 100MB or 1,000 files. Larger files may take longer to upload
cut & paste - to submit text directly into the submission box. Use this to copy and paste a submission from a file format that is not supported. This method supports plain text only (no images or non-text information)
iThenticate currently accepts the following file types for document upload:
Microsoft Word® (.doc and .docx)
Word XML
plain text (.txt)
Adobe PostScript®
Portable Document Format (.pdf)
HTML
Corel WordPerfect® (.wpd)
Rich Text Format (.rtf)
Each file may not exceed 400 pages, and each file size may not exceed 100 MB. Reduce the size of larger files by removing non-text content. You can’t upload or submit to iThenticate files that are password-protected, encrypted, hidden, system files, or read-only.
.pdf documents must contain text - if they contain only images of text, they will be rejected during the upload attempt. To check, copy and paste a section of the .pdf into a plain-text editor such as Microsoft Notepad® or Apple TextEdit®. If no text is copied over, the selection does not contain text.
To convert scanned images of a document, or an image saved as a .pdf, use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to convert the image to text. The conversion software can introduce errors, so manually check and correct the converted document.
Some document formats can contain multiple data types, such as text, images, embedded information from another file, and formatting. Non-text information that is not saved directly within the document will not be included in a file upload, for example, references to a Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet included within a Microsoft Office Word® document.
Use a word-processing program to save your file as one of the accepted types listed above, such as .rtf or .txt. Neither file type supports images or non-text data within the file. Plain text format does not support any formatting, and rich text format allows only limited formatting.
When converting a file to a new format, save it with a different name from the original, to avoid accidentally overwriting the original file. This is especially important when converting to plain text or rich text formats, to prevent permanent loss of the original formatting or image content of the file.
