This blog post is from Lettie Conrad and Michelle Urberg, cross-posted from the The Scholarly Kitchen.
As sponsors of this project, we at Crossref are excited to see this work shared out.
The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.
When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organizations around the world, representing 148 countries.
As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organizations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all.
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.
To work out which version you’re on, take a look at the website address that you use to access iThenticate. If you go to ithenticate.com then you are using v1. If you use a bespoke URL, https://crossref-[your member ID].turnitin.com/ then you are using v2.
Upload a File allows you to submit a single document from a variety of document types. From the Submit a document menu, click Upload a File, and the Upload a file form opens.
Under Destination Folder, choose the folder to which you wish to upload the file. Its Similarity Report will be added to the same folder.
Complete Author First Name, Author Last Name, and Document Title fields. If Document Title is left blank, the document’s filename will be used.
Click Choose File, and locate the file to upload. Use Add another file to add more files, up to a total of ten.
Click Upload to proceed with with uploading the selected document(s), or click Cancel to cancel the upload.
Zip file upload (v1)
iThenticate allows you to submit multiple documents from a variety of document types in a compressed zip file. The zip file may be up to approximately 100MB in size and contain up to 1,000 individual files. If the zip file exceeds either limit, it will be rejected. Check that your zip file contains only accepted file types, and no duplicate copies of the same file.
Click Zip File Upload from the Submit a document menu. Choose your Destination Folder from the drop-down. The Similarity Report for the file will also be found here.
The information you enter in the Author First Name and Author Last Name fields will be applied to all the documents in the zip file. You can manually change these once the document is uploaded to the folder.
Click Choose file, locate the zip file on your device, and click Upload.
The title of the each document in the zip files will be the default title of each submission.
Cut and paste (v1)
Use the cut and paste submission option to submit information from non-supported file types, or to submit only specific parts or areas of a document.
Only text can be submitted using this method - any graphics, graphs, images, and formatting are lost when pasting into the text submission box.
Click Cut & Paste from the Submit a document menu.
Choose your Destination Folder from the drop-down. The Similarity Report for the file will also be found here.
Complete the Author First Name, Author Last Name, and Document Title fields. If no title is given, the default title “Pasted Document” will be used.
Copy your desired text for checking, paste it into the Paste your document in the area below text box, and click Upload.
To view recent uploads, go to the Submit a document menu, click Recent Uploads, and you will see recent uploads listed in reverse chronological order (most recent first). Click the Date & Time header to see the uploads in chronological order (oldest first).
Edit document information (v1)
To edit a document’s information (title and author name), click the edit icon to the right of a document in a folder. You will see the Document Properties page. Edit the fields, and click Update to save your changes.
Page owner: Kathleen Luschek | Last updated 2020-May-19
