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.
Update 2024: We are no longer able to offer the Similarity Check service to members based in Russia. Find out more.
Similarity Check is only available to Crossref members who have full-text URLs for Similarity Check present in the metadata of at least 90% of their registered articles (across all journal prefixes). These URLs must point directly to the full-text PDF, HTML, or plain text content and if your content is behind authentication, you need to safelist the Turnitin IP address. Learn more about how to participate.
You can check the percentage of Similarity Check URLs already included in your metadata using the widget below - just start typing your account name in the box, select the correct one from the list, and your result will be automatically calculated. Don’t worry, you don’t need to know your Member ID.
If you do meet the threshold, the widget will link you to a form where you can apply for Similarity Check and click to accept the service terms. If you don’t meet the threshold, the widget will provide a .csv file to download which shows all your DOIs that don’t have Similarity Check full-text URLs. It will also provide instructions for how to add the missing full-text URLs.
Good news - you’re eligible to apply for our Similarity Check service.
You can now apply here and accept the service terms.
Once we receive your application, we’ll work with the team at Turnitin to confirm that they can access your content. If they can’t access your content, we won’t be able to continue with your application until this problem is solved, but we’ll work with you to fix any issues. Don’t forget, if your full-text content is protected by authentication, then you’ll need to ask your hosting provider to safelist Turnitin’s IP range to ensure your content is accessible for indexing purposes. Do make sure that this is done before you apply.
We’ll also send you a pro-rated invoice for your first year subscription to the service.
We’re sorry, but you are not eligible to register for our Similarity Check service just yet. To be eligible you need to register full-text urls for Similarity Check pointing to the full text article for more than 90% of your content.
Find out how to add these full-text urls for Similarity Check to your existing content. To see exactly which content items are missing the full text article, simply click the “Generate CSV” button above. Please note, this CSV can only show the first 10k content items. If you have more than 10k content items missing DOIs, please contact us and we'll be able to provide you with the full list.
We’re sorry, but you are not eligible to register for our Similarity Check service just yet. It looks as though you haven’t registered any content with us yet.
To be eligible for Similarity Check you need to be registering content with us and including URLs for Similarity Check that point to the full text article for at least 90% of your content. Find out more about how to register content and learn more about full-text URLs for Similarity Check.
Please note - if you aren’t registering ANY journal articles at all and are only registering non-journal content (eg conference papers, books) then the tool may not give accurate results. Please contact our support team for more help.
Unfortunately, you aren’t currently eligible for the Similarity Check service as you don’t have Similarity Check URLs in the metadata of over 90% of your content. As you have so many DOIs registered, we can’t provide a CSV file showing which DOIs are missing the Similarity Check URLs. Please contact our support team with our team and they’ll be able to provide you with the CSV file.
