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.
To work out which version you’re on, take a look at the website address that you use to access iThenticate. If you go to ithenticate.com then you are using v1. If you use a bespoke URL, https://crossref-[your member ID].turnitin.com/ then you are using v2.
When your organization signs up for Similarity Check, a central contact at your organization will become your Similarity Check account administrator. They will set up all the users on your account.
When your administrator adds you as a user, you’ll receive an email from noreply@ithenticate.com with the subject line “Account Created” containing a username and a single-use password. You may only log in once with the single-use password, and you must change it the first time you log in.
Log in to your user account (v1)
Start from the link in the invitation email from noreply@ithenticate.com with the subject line “Account Created” and click Login
Enter your username and single-use password
Click to agree to the terms of the end-user license agreement. These terms govern your personal use of the service. They’re separate from the central Similarity Check service agreement that your organization has agreed to.
To change your email address, remove your current address from the ​Email​ field, enter your new email in the same field, and click ​Update Profile​ to save.
To change your password, enter a new password in the Change Password field, repeat it in the Confirm Password field, and click ​Update Profile​ to save.
Find your way around for users (v1)
In the main navigation bar at the top of the screen, you will see several tabs:
Folders: this is the main area of iThenticate, where you upload, manage, and view documents for checking
