At Crossref and ROR, we develop and run processes that match metadata at scale, creating relationships between millions of entities in the scholarly record. Over the last few years, we’ve spent a lot of time diving into details about metadata matching strategies, evaluation, and integration. It is quite possibly our favourite thing to talk and write about! But sometimes it is good to step back and look at the problem from a wider perspective.
This year’s public data file is now available, featuring over 156 million metadata records deposited with Crossref through the end of April 2024 from over 19,000 members. A full breakdown of Crossref metadata statistics is available here.
Like last year, you can download all of these records in one go via Academic Torrents or directly from Amazon S3 via the “requester pays” method.
Download the file: The torrent download can be initiated here.
Earlier this year, we reported on the roundtable discussion event that we had organised in Frankfurt on the heels of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023. This event was the second in the series of roundtable events that we are holding with our community to hear from you how we can all work together to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record - you can read more about insights from these events and about ISR in this series of blogs.
Crossref is undertaking a large program, dubbed 'RCFS' (Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability) that will initially tackle five specific issues with our fees. We haven’t increased any of our fees in nearly two decades, and while we’re still okay financially and do not have a revenue growth goal, we do have inclusion and simplification goals. This report from Research Consulting helped to narrow down the five priority projects for 2024-2025 around these three core goals:
In 2022, we flagged up some changes to Similarity Check, which were taking place in v2 of Turnitin’s iThenticate tool used by members participating in the service. We noted that further enhancements were planned, and want to highlight some changes that are coming very soon. These changes will affect functionality that is used by account administrators, and doesn’t affect the Similarity Reports themselves.
From Wednesday 3 May 2023, administrators of iThenticate v2 accounts will notice some changes to the interface and improvements to the Users, Groups, Integrations, Statistics and Paper Lookup sections.
Logging in
iThenticate v2 account administrators and browser users will see a new login page when logging in to iThenticate v2:
A refreshed interface
Once logged in to iThenticate v2, account administrators will see an updated design, with improved notifications to let them know whether a task/action has been successfully completed or not.
Users
There will be improvements to the user management system for account administrators, including a much clearer navigation menu for managing active, pending and deactivated users.
There will also be a filtering option on the Users page to search for active, pending and deactivated users by first name, last name, email address, group and date added. In addition coloured labels will be introduced to easily identify the level of access (or ‘Role’) for each user.
An improved bulk user import process will be available, with clearer guidance on any issues that may arise during the upload. This new development will also include new screens for adding and editing users with more notifications to help prevent mistakes.
Integrations
For account administrators managing peer review management system integrations and needing to generate API keys, the Integrations page will be improved to make copying API keys simpler.
Statistics
iThenticate v2 administrators will also notice some improvements to the Statistics page. Usage data should load faster and will be sortable by user group. They will also be able to generate large usage reports of over 100k submissions.
Paper lookup
The Paper lookup will allow iThenticate v2 account administrators to find submissions that have been made from any integration connected to their iThenticate v2 account. They can be found by searching the paper ID (or oid number) of the submission.
Please note: the ability to search for submissions by the user’s name is available for manuscripts submitted via the iThenticate v2 website only and not for papers submitted via an integration.
New password requirements
To improve the security of users’ accounts, new password requirements will be introduced, including a minimum of 8 symbols, 1 special symbol, 1 upper case letter, and 1 number.
Next in iThenticate v2
Turnitin, who produce iThenticate, are currently working on a number of new features and developments including an improved similarity report, paraphrase and AI writing detection. A detailed timeline is not yet available but we’ll be updating you on these new developments in the coming months.
✏️ Do get in touch via support@crossref.org if you have any questions about iThenticate v1 or v2 or start a discussion by commenting on this post below.