Background The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) provides a set of guidelines for operating open infrastructure in service to the scholarly community. It sets out 16 points to ensure that the infrastructure on which the scholarly and research communities rely is openly governed, sustainable, and replicable. Each POSI adopter regularly reviews progress, conducts periodic audits, and self-reports how they’re working towards each of the principles.
In 2020, Crossref’s board voted to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and we completed our first self-audit.
In June 2022, we wrote a blog post “Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events” outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic. We took into account three key areas:
The environment and climate change Inclusion Work/life balance We are aware that many of our members are also interested in minimizing their impacts on the environment, and we are overdue for an update on meeting our own commitments, so here goes our summary for the year 2023!
Metadata is one of the most important tools needed to communicate with each other about science and scholarship. It tells the story of research that travels throughout systems and subjects and even to future generations. We have metadata for organising and describing content, metadata for provenance and ownership information, and metadata is increasingly used as signals of trust.
Following our panel discussion on the same subject at the ALPSP University Press Redux conference in May 2024, in this post we explore the idea that metadata, once considered important mostly for discoverability, is now a vital element used for evidence and the integrity of the scholarly record.
For the third year in a row, Crossref hosted a roundtable on research integrity prior to the Frankfurt book fair. This year the event looked at Crossmark, our tool to display retractions and other post-publication updates to readers.
Since the start of 2024, we have been carrying out a consultation on Crossmark, gathering feedback and input from a range of members. The roundtable discussion was a chance to check and refine some of the conclusions we’ve come to, and gather more suggestions on the way forward.
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.
