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.
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 iThenticate 2.0.
Upload a File allows you to submit a single document from a variety of document types. From the Submit a document menu, click Upload a File, and the Upload a file form opens.
Under Destination Folder, choose the folder to which you wish to upload the file. Its Similarity Report will be added to the same folder.
Complete Author First Name, Author Last Name, and Document Title fields. If Document Title is left blank, the document’s filename will be used.
Click Choose File, and locate the file to upload. Use Add another file to add more files, up to a total of ten.
Click Upload to proceed with with uploading the selected document(s), or click Cancel to cancel the upload.
Zip file upload (v1)
iThenticate allows you to submit multiple documents from a variety of document types in a compressed zip file. The zip file may be up to approximately 100MB in size and contain up to 1,000 individual files. If the zip file exceeds either limit, it will be rejected. Check that your zip file contains only accepted file types, and no duplicate copies of the same file.
Click Zip File Upload from the Submit a document menu. Choose your Destination Folder from the drop-down. The Similarity Report for the file will also be found here.
The information you enter in the Author First Name and Author Last Name fields will be applied to all the documents in the zip file. You can manually change these once the document is uploaded to the folder.
Click Choose file, locate the zip file on your device, and click Upload.
The title of the each document in the zip files will be the default title of each submission.
Cut and paste (v1)
Use the cut and paste submission option to submit information from non-supported file types, or to submit only specific parts or areas of a document.
Only text can be submitted using this method - any graphics, graphs, images, and formatting are lost when pasting into the text submission box.
Click Cut & Paste from the Submit a document menu.
Choose your Destination Folder from the drop-down. The Similarity Report for the file will also be found here.
Complete the Author First Name, Author Last Name, and Document Title fields. If no title is given, the default title “Pasted Document” will be used.
Copy your desired text for checking, paste it into the Paste your document in the area below text box, and click Upload.
To view recent uploads, go to the Submit a document menu, click Recent Uploads, and you will see recent uploads listed in reverse chronological order (most recent first). Click the Date & Time header to see the uploads in chronological order (oldest first).
Edit document information (v1)
To edit a document’s information (title and author name), click the edit icon to the right of a document in a folder. You will see the Document Properties page. Edit the fields, and click Update to save your changes.
Page maintainer: Kathleen Luschek Last updated: 2020-May-19
