Kirsty Meddings

Crossref’s Similarity Check service is used by our members to detect text overlap with previously published work that may indicate plagiarism of scholarly or professional works. Manuscripts can be checked against millions of publications from other participating Crossref members and general web content using the iThenticate text comparison software from Turnitin.

TL;DR: We no longer charge fees for members to participate in Crossmark, and we encourage all our members to register metadata about corrections and retractions - even if you can’t yet add the Crossmark button and pop-up box to your landing pages or PDFs.

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Update: Deadline extended to 23:59 (UTC) 13th March 2020.

Distributed Usage Logging (DUL) allows publishers to capture traditional usage activity related to their content that happens on sites other than their own so they can provide reports of “total usage”, for example to subscribing institutions, regardless of where that usage happens.

The Open Funder Registry plays a critical role in making sure that our members correctly identify the funding sources behind the research that they are publishing. It addresses a similar problem to the one that led to the creation of ORCID: researchers’ names are hard to disambiguate and are rarely unique; they get abbreviated, have spelling variations and change over time. The same is true of organizations. You don’t have to read all that many papers to see authors acknowledge funding from the US National Institutes of Health as NIH, National Institutes for Health, National Institute of Health, etc.

You can’t go far on this blog without reading about the importance of registering rich metadata. Over the past year we’ve been encouraging all of our members to review the metadata they are sending us and find out which gaps need filling by looking at their Participation Report.

The metadata elements that are tracked in Participation Reports are mostly beyond the standard bibliographic information that is used to identify a work. They are important because they provide context: they tell the reader how the research was funded, what license it’s published under, and more about its authors via links to their ORCID profiles. And while this metadata is all available through our APIs, we also display much of it to readers through our Crossmark service.