Some small organizations who want to register metadata for their research and participate in Crossref are not able to do so due to financial, technical, or language barriers. To attempt to reduce these barriers we have developed several programs to help facilitate membership. One of the most significant—and successful—has been our Sponsor program.
Sponsors are organizations that are generally not producing scholarly content themselves but work with or publish on behalf of groups of smaller organizations that wish to join Crossref but face barriers to do so independently.
This blog post is from Lettie Conrad and Michelle Urberg, cross-posted from the The Scholarly Kitchen.
As sponsors of this project, we at Crossref are excited to see this work shared out.
The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.
When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organizations around the world, representing 148 countries.
As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organizations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all.
In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful.
Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery.
Not sure if you’re using iThenticate v1 or iThenticate v2? More here.
Not sure whether you’re an account administrator? Check here.
Manage your admin account
Manage your admin account using the Account Information tab. From here, you can make changes to your details in My Profile, set up URL filters and phrase exclusions across the whole account, and set up API access to connect your iThenticate account to your manuscript submission system.
Your admin account profile (v1)
The Account Information section shows important information about your iThenticate account, including your account name, account ID, and user ID. Please ignore the iThenticate account expiry date - we’re working with iThenticate to have this removed. The iThenticate account expiry date is set to 1 June 2022 by default.
From Account Info, then My Profile, you can:
Update your profile: this form shows your current details. To make changes, enter your password in the Current Password field at the top of the form.
Change the name attributed to your account: enter the first and last name in the relevant fields. These fields are required, you cannot leave them blank.
Change your email address: enter your email into the email field. This email address is used to send you important account information, so please make sure it is valid. This field is required, you cannot leave it blank.
Add a photo to your account: click Choose File, and select the image file you want to upload.
Change your password: enter your current password in the Current Password field, enter your new password in the Change Password field, and enter it again in the Confirm Password field.
Click Update Profile to save your changes.
URL filters (v1)
This tab only appears if you are an account administrator.
Use URL filters to apply URL exclusion filters across your account. Any URLs that you add here will be ignored when the system checks your manuscript against the iThenticate database, and it will apply across your whole account. If you want to let individual users decide which URLs to exclude instead, they can do this themselves at folder level.
Add a URL to be filtered, and click Add URL. Don’t forget to include / at the end of your URL. Click the X icon to the right of the URL to remove it.
Phrase exclusions (v1)
This tab only appears if you are an account administrator.
Use Phrase Exclusions to apply phrase exclusion filters across your account. Any phrases that you add here will be ignored when the system checks your manuscript against the iThenticate database, and it will apply across your whole account. If you want to let individual users decide which phrases to exclude instead, they can do this themselves at folder level.
Click Add a new phrase, enter the phrase you would like to exclude in the Phrase text field, and click Create. You can add another phrase, go Back to List, or go Back to Account.
From the main Phrase Exclusions page, you can view, edit, or remove a phrase.
API access (v1)
This tab only appears if you are an account administrator.
If you want to connect your iThenticate account to your manuscript submission system, you can do this using the API. Once connected, you’ll be able to submit manuscripts for checking from within your manuscript submission system and see limited results. However, you’ll need to visit the iThenticate website to explore the results further.
You’ll need to contact iThenticate to set up access to the iThenticate API. Once your account has API access enabled, you’ll see the API Access IP addresses option under Account Info.
Use the IP addresses field to specify the IP address ranges that are allowed access to your account. Talk to your manuscript submission system contact for details of what to include here.
Use the special address 0.0.0.0 to allow access from any IP address. Enter addresses individually, or in Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) format, such as 192.68.2.0/24. Add multiple addresses by separating them with a space.
