Scholarly metadata, deposited by thousands of our members and made openly available can act as âtrust signalsâ for the publications. It provides information that helps others in the community to verify and assess the integrity of the work. Despite having a central responsibility in ensuring the integrity of the work that they publish, editorial teams tend not be fully aware of the value of metadata for integrity of the scholarly record. How can we change that?
Crossref was created back in 2000 by 12 forward-thinking scholarly publishers from North America and Europe, and by 2002, these members had registered 4 million DOI records. At the time of writing, we have over 23,600 members in 164 different countries. Half of our members are based in Asia, and 35% are universities or scholar-led. These members have registered over 176 million open metadata records with DOIs (as of today). What a difference 25 years makes!
In our 25th anniversary year, I thought it would be time to take a look at how we got here. And soâhold tightâweâre going to go on an adventure through space and time1, stopping every 5 years through Crossref history to check in on our members. And weâre going to see some really interesting changes over the years.
The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest book fair in the world, and therefore a key event on our calendar. Held annually in Frankfurt, Germany, the 77th Frankfurt Book Fair (October 15â19, 2025) saw 118,000 trade visitors and 120,000 private visitors from 131 countries. The Crossref booth was located, as usual, in Hall 4.0 where all the stands with information about academic publishing can be found. Four Crossref colleagues attended the Book Fair this year, and in this blog post, you can read more about their meetings, experiences, and plans.Â
TL;DR. Metadata Manager will be retired at the end of 2025. Over the past four years, we have been developing a new helper tool to replace it, and that tool has now reached a stage of maturity that means we will be able to switch off Metadata Manager by the end of the year.
This section is for Similarity Check account administrators using iThenticate 2.0 through the browser, and describes how you can manage exclusions within your account settings..
Not sure if you’re using iThenticate v1 or iThenticate 2.0? More here.
Not sure whether you’re an account administrator? Find out here.
Exclusions
If you want to exclude items from your Similarity Report results, you can do this by clicking on Settings in the left hand menu in iThenticate 2.0 homepage. There are two tabs where you can change different items - one is labelled Crossref Web, and the other is labelled Web and API. Here are the various items you can exclude.
Preprint Label and Exclusions
iThenticate 2.0 introduces a new feature which will automatically identify preprint sources within your Similarity Report. This will allow you to easily identify preprints so your editors can make a quick decision as to whether to investigate this source further or exclude it from the report.
In order to start using this feature you will need to configure it within the iThenticate settings by logging directly into your iThenticate account. You can find instructions on how to configure this feature in Turnitin’s help documentation.
You also have the option to automatically exclude all preprint sources from reports. All excluded preprints will still be available within the Similarity Exclusions panel of your Similarity Report and can be reincluded in the report.
Further details of how preprints appear within the Similarity Report can be found in Turnitin’s help documentation .
The Website Exclusions setting will allow you to automatically exclude all matches to specific websites. Instructions on how to turn on and configure this feature can be found in Turnitin’s help documentation.
This feature will only exclude matches in the Internet repository. If a journal website is added to the list of excluded websites then all pages which have been crawled and indexed into Turnitinâs Internet repository will be excluded. However, journal articles from that journal which appear in the Crossref repository will not be excluded.
This feature will apply to all submissions made to the iThenticate account; including all web submissions and submissions made through any integration.
All excluded matches will still be available within the Similarity Exclusions panel of your Similarity Report and can be reincluded in the report. Further details of how these exclusions will appear can be found in Turnitin’s help documentation.
Customized Exclusions
A new feature in iThenticate 2.0 is Customized Exclusions. The Customized Exclusions setting allows administrators to create sections of text that can be excluded from the Similarity Report. Administrators can tailor these keywords and phrases to best meet the needs of their organisation (for example, âFurther Acknowledgmentsâ).
