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.
Preprints have become an important tool for rapidly communicating and iterating on research outputs. There is now a range of preprint servers, some subject-specific, some based on a particular geographical area, and others linked to publishers or individual journals in addition to generalist platforms. In 2016 the Crossref schema started to support preprints and since then the number of metadata records has grown to around 16,000 new preprint DOIs per month.
TL;DR One of the things that makes me glad to work at Crossref is the principles to which we hold ourselves, and the most public and measurable of those must be the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, or POSI, for short. These ambitions lay out how we want to operate - to be open in our governance, in our membership and also in our source code and data. And it’s that openness of source code that’s the reason for my post today - on 26th September 2022, our first collaboration with the JSON Forms open-source project was released into the wild.
Ans: metadata and services are all underpinned by POSI.
Leading into a blog post with a question always makes my brain jump ahead to answer that question with the simplest answer possible. I was a nightmare English Literature student. ‘Was Macbeth purely a villain?’ ‘No’. *leaves exam*
Just like not giving one-word answers to exam questions, playing our role in the integrity of the scholarly record and helping our members enhance theirs takes thought, explanation, transparency, and work.
The Similarity Check service gives Crossref members reduced rate access to the iThenticate tool from Turnitin, and there’s now a new version of iThenticate available for some subscribers. iThenticate v2 has lots of new and improved features, including:
The ability to identify content on preprint servers more easily
A “red flag” feature that signals the detection of hidden text such as text/quotation marks in white font, or suspicious character replacement
A faster, more user-friendly and responsive Similarity Report interface
For those members who integrate their iThenticate account with a Manuscript Tracking Service (MTS) there are even more benefits - you can now submit your manuscripts and view your Similarity Report from within the MTS, and you can also manage your exclusions from within your MTS too. There are also some important changes in how you manage users.
You can find out more about the benefits of iThenticate v2 on our blog.
Who can upgrade from iThenticate v1 to iThenticate v2?
Most existing subscribers to Similarity Check are currently using iThenticate v1, and over the next year or so we’ll be inviting these members to upgrade to iThenticate v2. Not everyone can upgrade immediately. This is because many members integrate their iThenticate account with their Manuscript Tracking Service (MTS), and not all the MTSs are able to integrate with iThenticate v2 just yet.
An upgrade is currently available to members of Crossref:
Using iThenticate through the browser
Integrating iThenticate with eJournal Press
Integrating iThenticate with ScholarOne Manuscripts
Integrating iThenticate with Scholastica Peer Review
We’ll be letting members know as the other Manuscript Tracking Systems are able to integrate with iThenticate v2. Brand new subscribers who fall into the categories above will be set up directly on iThenticate v2.
Not sure if you’re currently using iThenticate v1 or iThenticate v2? Here’s how to check.
The upgrade process
When you are able to upgrade from iThenticate v1 to iThenticate v2, we will contact the Similarity Check editorial contact on your account and ask you to complete a form. We will then check that you are still eligible for Similarity Check. This means that we will check that you are still providing Similarity Check URLs for at least 90% of the content you have registered with Crossref, and that the team at Turnitin can continue to index this content into the iThenticate database.
Once this is done, the team at Turnitin will send an email to the Similarity Check editorial contact on your account, so they can set up administrator credentials on your new iThenticate v2 account. 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 v2 account.
Once you have administrator access to your new iThenticate v2 account, you can follow the instructions for getting set up. There are a different set of instructions depending on whether:
You will be using iThenticate directly in the browser - more here.
You will be integrating iThenticate with your Manuscript Tracking System (MTS) - more here.
If you have any follow up questions after your upgrade, do read our upgrade FAQs.
Page owner: Amanda Bartell | Last updated 2022-July-15
