Crossref members register around 37,000 records daily. All this metadata is openly shared with the global scholarly community through our free APIs. We receive over two billion calls to our API each month, signalling its use by hundreds of tools and services worldwide, supporting the discovery and assessment of scholarly metadata. As part of a new series in our blog, we will spotlight the diversity of tools and integrations that rely on Crossref metadata to serve the scholarly community. In this initial post, we chat to Luca Foppiano, the developer and maintainer of Grobid1, to learn about how Grobid uses Crossref metadata to improve the extraction and enrichment of bibliographic information from scholarly PDFs.
On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2026 board election. Every active member organisation is invited to submit a ballot to elect the incoming board class.
We’re providing a summary of the board’s July 2026 meeting. The July board meeting is our only in-person meeting. The board gathers for two days of strategic thinking and long-range planning, as well as conducting annual board business. This year, we focused on allocating surplus funds we have on hand to invest in a three-year project to redesign the content system. In a related discussion, we decided to lower content registration fees starting in 2027 because we’ve had a demonstrated history of generating surpluses, exceeding what we need to run Crossref. We also discussed the board structure, as part of our regular review of stakeholder governance. And we conducted annual board business, such as approving the audited financial statements and reviewed our risk register and mitigation plans.
The resolutions are available on the dedicated section of our website, which also lists the members of the Board and offers further information about our governance.
We also managed to squeeze in watching a World Cup game over dinner.
Starting today, funder names deposited in Crossref metadata without an identifier will be matched to ROR IDs, to support an open and connected Research Nexus. Funding information is an increasingly important part of the scholarly record. The improved matching strategy supports researchers, funders, institutions, and meta-researchers, who rely on that information to understand how research is supported and what outcomes that support produces.
Crossref’s Similarity Check service is used by our members to detect text overlap with previously published work that may indicate plagiarism of scholarly or professional works. Manuscripts can be checked against millions of publications from other participating Crossref members and general web content using the iThenticate text comparison software from Turnitin.
The 2000 members who already make use of Similarity Check upload almost 2,000,000 documents each month to look for matching text in other publications.
We have some great news for those 2000 members –– a completely new version of iThenticate is on its way, and will start to roll out to users in the coming months.
New functionality has been developed based on your feedback over the past few years and includes:
An improved Document Viewer that makes PDFs searchable and accessible, with responsive design for ease of use on different screen sizes. All of the functionality of the Viewer and the Text-only reports in the previous version have been streamlined into just two views: Sources Overview and All Sources.
Improved exclusion options to make refining matches even easier. Smarter citation detection now identifies probable citations both inline and in reference sections.
A new “Content Portal” where you can see what percentage of your own content has been successfully indexed for the iThenticate comparison database, and download reports of indexing errors that need to be fixed.
A new API for integration with manuscript submission systems allows display of the largest matching word count and the top 5 source matches alongside the Similarity Score.
The maximum number of pages and file size per document has been doubled to 800 pages/200 MB.
The new document viewer in iThenticate v2.0
Improved reference exclusion
Crossref members can use Similarity Check directly by logging in, or via an integration with a submission/peer review system. We are working with many system providers to bring v2.0 to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, we are looking for members to help us test the new system directly in the iThenticate user interface. If you are interested and can spare a few hours some time in the next month please let me know.
And if your organisation is not yet using Similarity Check to assess the originality of the manuscripts you receive do take a look at the many benefits the service has to offer.
Related reading
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Similarity Check news: iThenticate v2.0 ready for launch
