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.
This section of our documentation is for Similarity Check account administrators who are integrating iThenticate v2 with their Manuscript Submission System (MTS).
Not sure if you’re using iThenticate v1 or iThenticate v2? More here.
Not sure whether you’re an account administrator? Find out here.
As an administrator, you decide how your organization uses the iThenticate tool. You’ll find the system easier to use if you set it up correctly to start with, so do read through the checklist below carefully and make sure you’ve set up your account as you want it before you start checking your manuscripts.
To set up your integration, you need to create an API key by logging into iThenticate through the browser. You will then share this API key and the URL of your iThenticate v2 account with your MTS. Find out more.
If you are using OJS and want to use the iThenticate plugin, you’ll need to ensure that you’re on OJS version 3.3, 3.4, or 3.5. For instructions on how to upgrade your OJS instance, please visit PKP’s documentation here or here, depending on which version you’re currently running.
2. Decide on your exclusions
You can decide to exclude preprints, certain websites, or even specific sections of text. We recommend starting without any exclusions to avoid excluding anything important. Once your users are experienced enough to identify words and phrases that appear frequently but are not potentially problematic matches (and can therefore be ignored) in a Similarity Report, you can start carefully making use of this feature.
If you are integrating iThenticate v2 with your MTS, you don’t need to set up more users or folders in your iThenticate - everything will be managed from your MTS. Find out more.
4. Decide if you want to use the Submitted Works repository (or Private Repository)
The Submitted Works repository (or Private Repository) 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 but it also means you could share sensitive data between users, so you need to think very carefully about how you will use this feature. This feature is currently only available to those integrating with ScholarOne Manuscripts. Find out more.
5. Decide how you’ll budget for your document checking fees
There’s a charge for each document checked, and you’ll receive an invoice in January each year for the documents you’ve checked in the previous year. If you’re a member of Crossref through a Sponsor, your Sponsor will receive this invoice.
As well as setting a Similarity Check document fees budget for your account each year, it’s useful to monitor document checking and see if you’re on track. You can monitor your usage in your Statistics section. Ask yourself:
How many documents do you plan to check?
How often do you want to monitor usage? Set yourself a reminder to check your Statistics periodically.
It’s a good idea to come back to these questions periodically, consider how your use of the tool is evolving, and make changes accordingly.
6. Make sure you can stay eligible for the Similarity Check service
Your organization gets reduced rate access to the iThenticate tool through the Similarity Check service because you make your own published content avaialble to be indexed into the iThenticate database. You do this by providing full text URLs specifically for this service in the metadata that you register with Crossref. Talk to your colleagues who are responsible for registering your DOIs with Crossref, and make sure that they continue to include full text URLs for Similarity Check in the metadata they register with us.
