Crossref was created back in 2000 by 12 forward-thinking scholarly publishers from North America and Europe, and by 2002, these members had registered 4 million DOI records. At the time of writing, we have over 23,600 members in 164 different countries. Half of our members are based in Asia, and 35% are universities or scholar-led. These members have registered over 176 million open metadata records with DOIs (as of today). What a difference 25 years makes!
In our 25th anniversary year, I thought it would be time to take a look at how we got here. And so—hold tight—we’re going to go on an adventure through space and time1, stopping every 5 years through Crossref history to check in on our members. And we’re going to see some really interesting changes over the years.
The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest book fair in the world, and therefore a key event on our calendar. Held annually in Frankfurt, Germany, the 77th Frankfurt Book Fair (October 15–19, 2025) saw 118,000 trade visitors and 120,000 private visitors from 131 countries. The Crossref booth was located, as usual, in Hall 4.0 where all the stands with information about academic publishing can be found. Four Crossref colleagues attended the Book Fair this year, and in this blog post, you can read more about their meetings, experiences, and plans.Â
TL;DR. Metadata Manager will be retired at the end of 2025. Over the past four years, we have been developing a new helper tool to replace it, and that tool has now reached a stage of maturity that means we will be able to switch off Metadata Manager by the end of the year.
Our REST API makes all of the metadata we hold publicly available. It receives the majority of our API traffic, with around 1 billion hits per month. It’s one of the key ways that we fulfil our mission to make research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. From 1 December 2025, we will be revising the rate limits for the public and polite pools of the REST API to ensure that we can maintain a stable and reliable system, and that metadata is freely available to everyone.
This section shows Similarity Check account administrators using iThenticate v1 how to update their account admin settings. You need to follow the steps in this section before you start to set up your users and share the account with your colleagues.
If you are using iThenticate 2.0 rather than iThenticate v1, there are separate instructions for you.
Not sure if you’re using iThenticate v1 or iThenticate 2.0? More here.
Not sure whether you’re an account administrator? Check here.
The Settings tab controls general, document, and report display options. These options include the number of documents shown for each page, default report view, and controlling email notifications.
General settings (v1)
Use General settings to set your home folder - this is the folder will open by default when you log in to iThenticate. Choose your home folder from the drop-down menu.
From the Number of documents to show drop-down, choose how many uploaded documents are listed in your folders before a new page is created.
Choose what is displayed after you upload a document to iThenticate: Display the upload folder (to see the processing of the document you have just uploaded), or Upload another document (returns you to the upload form).
You can also choose the time zone and language for your account - the language you choose will set the language of your user interface.
Click Update Settings to save your changes.
Documents settings (v1)
Use Documents settings to choose the default way iThenticate sorts your uploaded documents: by processed date, title, Similarity Score, and author. Choose your preferred option from the drop-down menu.
You can set the threshold at which the Similarity Score color changes, based on the percentage of similarity. All Similarity Scores above the percentage you set will appear in the folder in blue, all those beneath the percentage will appear in gray. This visual distinction helps you easily identify matches above a given threshold. Learn more about how to interpret the Similarity Score.
Click Update Settings to save your changes.
Reports settings (v1)
Use Reports settings to adjust your email notifications, choose whether to color-code your reports, and view available document repositories for your account.
Email notifications tell you when a Similarity Report has exceeded particular thresholds, including Similarity Reports in shared folders. Email notifications are sent to the email address you used to sign up to iThenticate.
Report email frequency: choose whether to receive notifications, chose how often you would like to receive them every hour, once a day, every other day, or once a week
Similarity Report threshold: this refers to a paper’s overall Similarity Score. If the Similarity Score of a paper in your account exceeds the threshold set, you will receive an email notification. The default setting is ‘don’t notify me’.
Content tracking report threshold: this refers to the All Sources section of the Similarity Report. If a single source for a paper in your account exceeds the similarity threshold set, you will receive an email notification. The default setting is don’t notify me.
Color code report: color-coding the Similarity Report can make viewing matches easier. Choose Yes or No to enable or disable this feature.
Available document repositories: this section shows the available repositories for your account. Modify them in the folder settings.
Page maintainer: Kathleen Luschek Last updated: 2020-May-19
