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.
The Similarity Check service gives Crossref members reduced rate access to the iThenticate tool from Turnitin, and there’s now a new version of iThenticate available for some subscribers. iThenticate v2 has lots of new and improved features, including:
The ability to identify content on preprint servers more easily
A “red flag” feature that signals the detection of hidden text such as text/quotation marks in white font, or suspicious character replacement
A faster, more user-friendly and responsive Similarity Report interface
For those members who integrate their iThenticate account with a Manuscript Tracking Service (MTS) there are even more benefits - you can now submit your manuscripts and view your Similarity Report from within the MTS, and you can also manage your exclusions from within your MTS too. There are also some important changes in how you manage users.
You can find out more about the benefits of iThenticate v2 on our blog.
Who can upgrade from iThenticate v1 to iThenticate v2?
Most existing subscribers to Similarity Check are currently using iThenticate v1, and over the next year or so we’ll be inviting these members to upgrade to iThenticate v2. Not everyone can upgrade immediately. This is because many members integrate their iThenticate account with their Manuscript Tracking Service (MTS), and not all the MTSs are able to integrate with iThenticate v2 just yet.
An upgrade is currently available to members of Crossref:
Using iThenticate through the browser
Integrating iThenticate with eJournal Press
Integrating iThenticate with ScholarOne Manuscripts
Integrating iThenticate with Scholastica Peer Review
Integrating iThenticate with Editorial Manager
We’ll be letting members know as the other Manuscript Tracking Systems are able to integrate with iThenticate v2. Brand new subscribers who fall into the categories above will be set up directly on iThenticate v2.
Not sure if you’re currently using iThenticate v1 or iThenticate v2? Here’s how to check.
The upgrade process
When you are able to upgrade from iThenticate v1 to iThenticate v2, we will contact the Similarity Check editorial contact on your account and ask you to complete a form. We will then check that you are still eligible for Similarity Check. This means that we will check that you are still providing Similarity Check URLs for at least 90% of the content you have registered with Crossref, and that the team at Turnitin can continue to index this content into the iThenticate database.
Once this is done, the team at Turnitin will send an email to the Similarity Check editorial contact on your account, so they can set up administrator credentials on your new iThenticate v2 account. The email will look like this:
Click on the blue ‘Set up my account’ button at the bottom of the email. This will bring you to a page which looks something like this:
Fill out your username and password, and don’t forget to tick to agree to the terms and conditions. You will then arrive at your new iThenticate v2 account.
Once you have administrator access to your new iThenticate v2 account, you can follow the instructions for getting set up. There are a different set of instructions depending on whether:
You will be using iThenticate directly in the browser - more here.
You will be integrating iThenticate with your Manuscript Tracking System (MTS) - more here.
If you have any follow up questions after your upgrade, do read our upgrade FAQs.
