Looking back over 2024, we wanted to reflect on where we are in meeting our goals, and report on the progress and plans that affect you - our community of 21,000 organisational members as well as the vast number of research initiatives and scientific bodies that rely on Crossref metadata.
In this post, we will give an update on our roadmap, including what is completed, underway, and up next, and a bit about what’s paused and why.
The Crossref2024 annual meeting gathered our community for a packed agenda of updates, demos, and lively discussions on advancing our shared goals. The day was filled with insights and energy, from practical demos of Crossref’s latest API features to community reflections on the Research Nexus initiative and the Board elections.
Our Board elections are always the focal point of the Annual Meeting. We want to start reflecting on the day by congratulating our newly elected board members: Katharina Rieck from Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Lisa Schiff from California Digital Library, Aaron Wood from American Psychological Association, and Amanda Ward from Taylor and Francis, who will officially join (and re-join) in January 2025.
Background The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) provides a set of guidelines for operating open infrastructure in service to the scholarly community. It sets out 16 points to ensure that the infrastructure on which the scholarly and research communities rely is openly governed, sustainable, and replicable. Each POSI adopter regularly reviews progress, conducts periodic audits, and self-reports how they’re working towards each of the principles.
In 2020, Crossref’s board voted to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and we completed our first self-audit.
In June 2022, we wrote a blog post “Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events” outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic. We took into account three key areas:
The environment and climate change Inclusion Work/life balance We are aware that many of our members are also interested in minimizing their impacts on the environment, and we are overdue for an update on meeting our own commitments, so here goes our summary for the year 2023!
Since we announced last September the launch of a new version of iThenticate, a number of you have upgraded and become familiar with iThenticate v2 and its new and improved features which include:
A faster, more user-friendly and responsive interface
A preprint exclusion filter, giving users the ability to identify content on preprint servers more easily
A new “red flag” feature that signals the detection of hidden text such as text/quotation marks in white font, or suspicious character replacement
A private repository available for browser users, allowing them to compare against their previous submissions to identify duplicate submissions within your organisation
A content portal, helping users check how much of their own research outputs have been successfully indexed, self-diagnose and fix the content that has failed to be indexed in iThenticate.
We’ve received some great feedback from iThenticate v2 users and user testers:
“There are a lot of new and helpful features implemented in version 2 of iThenticate.”
– Beilstein Institut
“The updates to the user interface make working with the new version a pleasure. It has a very modern feel and is easy to use, as an app on a phone. We particularly like being able to click on a link and easily exclude a source from view with just a few clicks. The response time and speed of download are also greatly improved which will cut down processing time on our end.”
– Frontiers
“I like the ability to be able to exclude content directly from the report.”
– American Chemical Society
More information for administrators and users is available on the Turnitin website: iThenticate v2 documentation.
Upgrading to iThenticate v2
In September, we started inviting new and existing Similarity Check subscribers using iThenticate in the browser to upgrade to this new version. And now some of the manuscript submission systems have completed their integrations with the new version of iThenticate too, so users of these systems can start to migrate. Morressier users are already using iThenticate v2, and in the next few days, we will be emailing all eJournalPress users. We know the other major manuscript submission systems are also working on their integrations, and we’ll be in touch with members using them as soon as they confirm they are ready.
Manuscript tracking system integrations
All Similarity Check subscribers using a manuscript management system will particularly appreciate a closer integration with iThenticate v2 which means that users will be able to view their Similarity Report and investigate sources within their manuscript tracking system.
eJournalPress
eJournalPress users will also be able to customise their iThenticate v2 settings via a configuration interface and to decide, for example, to include or exclude bibliographies from their Similarity Reports. The new integration will also show the top five matches returned by iThenticate directly in the eJournalPress interface.
eJournalPress configuration settings in iThenticate v2
Editorial Manager and ScholarOne
Aries (Editorial Manager) and Clarivate (ScholarOne) are planning to release their iThenticate v2 integrations later this year and we will be inviting users to upgrade in the coming months.
Please check our community forum for updates on manuscript tracking system integrations.
More new and improved features
User-friendly PDF report
“The report is clean and easy to read.”
– The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
“The clickable links will save us a considerable amount of time as they make it easy for the author to understand where the overlap is coming from, meaning we do not need to spend time clarifying overlap reports to the authors. The summary page is also very useful as authors and editors are easily able to see which sections have been included and excluded from the report.”
– Frontiers
The PDF version of the Similarity Report has been completely redesigned and can easily be downloaded, emailed and printed. It contains a summary of the report i.e. word count, character count, number of pages, file size, excluded sections, submission, and report dates as well as the similarity score and a list of the top sources with clickable links.
First page of the Similarity Report in iThenticate v2
Summary and clickable links in the new Similarity Report in iThenticate v2
Custom section exclusion filter
In iThenticate v2, users can now exclude sections that are standard such as authors, affiliations, ethics statements, acknowledgments, etc. from the Similarity Report which often impacts similarity scores. You can choose from the templates available and/or create your own custom section exclusions from the admin portal.
Custom section exclusion filter in the iThenticate v2 admin portal
Summary of excluded custom sections on the iThenticate v2 Similarity Report
“The user interface is definitely more responsive than v1, especially when I am looking at the full-text viewing mode, scrolling through the text to compare matches, reading through the box of text in the matching source […] I also especially like the options around excluding, I was able to see our submitted work was also taken into the database and showed matches against the papers we’d uploaded already. Going forward, this is a really interesting thing for us, especially if we are looking at duplicated content in the same journal.”
– Taylor & Francis
User reporting
Details of user activity including folder names, similarity scores, word count, and file format are now also available in iThenticate v2 and downloadable as Excel and csv. files.
Up next
Product development
Further enhancements to existing features and interface such as the view full-text mode, user groups, and custom section exclusions are planned for this year. Paraphrase detection and citation matching are currently in development.
iThenticate v2 training
iThenticate v2 documentation is available from the Turnitin website. Training videos and webinars will be available later on in the year.
✏️ 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 blog post below.
