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.
Use doc-to-doc comparison to compare a primary uploaded document with up to five comparison uploaded documents. Any documents that you upload to doc-to-doc comparison will not be indexed and will not be searchable against any future submissions.
Uploading a primary document to doc-to-doc comparison will cost you a single document submission, but the comparison documents uploaded will not cost you any submissions.
Start from Folders, go to the Submit a document menu, and click Doc-to-Doc Comparison.
The doc-to-doc comparison screen allows you to choose one primary document and up to five comparison documents. Choose the destination folder for the documents you will upload. The Similarity Report for the comparison will be added to the same folder.
For your primary document, provide the author’s first name, last name, and document title. If you do not provide these details, the filename will be used for the title, and the author details will stay blank.
If you have administrator permissions, you can assign the Similarity Report for the comparison to a reporting group by selecting one from the Reporting Group drop-down. Learn more about reporting groups.
Click Choose File, and select the file you want to upload as your primary document. See the file requirements for both the primary and comparison documents on the right of the screen.
You can choose up to five comparison documents to check against your primary document. These do not need to be given titles and author details. Each of the filenames must be unique. Click Choose Files, and select the files you would like to upload as comparison documents. To remove a file from the comparison before you upload it, click the X icon next to the file. To upload your files for comparison, click Upload.
Once your document has been uploaded and compared against the comparison documents, it will appear in your chosen destination folder.
This upload will have ‘Doc-to-Doc Comparison’ beneath the document title to show that this is a comparison upload and has not been indexed.
The upload will be given a Similarity Score against the selected comparison documents, which is also displayed in the report column. Click the similarity percentage to open the doc-to-doc comparison in the Document Viewer.
The Document Viewer is separated into three sections:
Along the top of the screen, the paper information bar shows details about the primary document, including document title, author, date the report was processed, word count, number of comparison documents provided, and how many of those documents matched with the primary document.
On the left panel is the paper text - this is the text of your primary document. Matching text is highlighted in red.
Your comparison documents will appear in the sources panel to the right, showing instances of matching text within the submitted documents.
By default, the doc-to-doc comparison will open the Document Viewer in the All Sources view. This view lists all the comparison documents you uploaded. Each comparison document has a percentage showing the amount of content within them that is similar to the primary document. If a comparison document has no matching text with the primary document, it has 0% next to it.
Doc-to-doc comparison can also be viewed in Match Overview mode. In this view, the comparison documents are listed with highest match percentage first, and all the sources are shown together, color-coded, on the paper text.
Page owner: Kathleen Luschek | Last updated 2020-May-19
