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.
Setting up your iThenticate 2.0 account MTS integration (admins only)
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Setting up your iThenticate 2.0 account MTS integration (admins only)
This section of our documentation is for Similarity Check account administrators who plan to access iThenticate 2.0 through their Manuscript Submission System (MTS).
If you are using iThenticate v1 rather than iThenticate 2.0, take a look at the section for v1 account administrators.
If you intend to use iThenticate 2.0 directly in the browser (and not through an integration with your Manuscript Submission System (MTS) please skip to the section on setting up iThenticate 2.0 for browser users for iThenticate administrators.
Your personal administrator account in iThenticate 2.0
Once Turnitin has enabled iThenticate 2.0 for your organisation, the main editorial contact provided on your application form will become the iThenticate account administrator.
You will receive an email from Turnitin with a link to set your credentials. The email will look like this:
Click on the blue ‘Set up my account’ button at the bottom of the email. This will bring you to a page which looks something like this:
Fill out your username and password, and don’t forget to tick to agree to the terms and conditions. You will then arrive at your new iThenticate 2.0 account.
How do you know if you’re an account administrator?
When you are logged in to iThenticate, what tabs can you see?
If you’re using iThenticate 2.0, you will only be able to see Users on the menu if you’re an account administrator.
So if you can’t see Manage Users or Users, you’re not an account administrator, and you can just read the user instructions for iThenticate 2.0 on the Turnitin website.
Updating your email address, username or password in the future
If you need to change your personal email address, username or password in the future, you can find instructions on the Turnitin website.
If you forgot your password and have never signed into your new 2.0 account, you’ll need to reach out to Turnitin’s support to have your password resent to you from Turnitin.
If you’ve already signed into your 2.0 account, but can’t remember your password, you can simply use the Forgot Password link on the login screen of your unique 2.0 website (https://crossref-xxx.turnitin.com, with xxx being your member ID).
Page maintainer: Amanda Bartell Last updated: 2022-July-15
