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In May, we updated you on the latest changes and improvements to the new version of iThenticate and let you know that a new similarity report and AI writing detection tool were on the horizon.

On Wednesday 1 November 2023, Turnitin (who produce iThenticate) will be releasing a brand new similarity report and a free preview to their AI writing detection tool in iThenticate v2. The AI writing detection tool will be enabled by default and account administrators will be able to switch it off/on.

Today, we are announcing a long-term plan to deprecate the Open Funder Registry. For some time, we have understood that there is significant overlap between the Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Funder IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders. It has therefore become clear that merging the two registries will make workflows more efficient and less confusing for all concerned. Crossref and ROR are therefore working together to ensure that Crossref members and funders can use ROR to simplify persistent identifier integrations, to register better metadata, and to help connect research outputs to research funders.

Ten years on from the launch of the Open Funder Registry (OFR, formerly FundRef), there is renewed interest in the potential of openly available funding metadata through Crossref. And with that: calls to improve the quality and completeness of that data. Currently, about 25% of Crossref records contain some kind of funding information. Over the years, this figure has grown steadily. A number of recent publications have shown, however, that there is considerable variation in the extent to which publishers deposit these data to Crossref. Technical but also business issues seem to lie at the root of this. Crossref - in close collaboration with the Dutch Research Council NWO and Sesame Open Science - brought together a group of 26 organizations from across the ecosystem to discuss the barriers and possible solutions. This blog presents some anonymized lessons learned.

In 2022, we flagged up some changes to Similarity Check, which were taking place in v2 of Turnitin’s iThenticate tool used by members participating in the service. We noted that further enhancements were planned, and want to highlight some changes that are coming very soon. These changes will affect functionality that is used by account administrators, and doesn’t affect the Similarity Reports themselves.

From Wednesday 3 May 2023, administrators of iThenticate v2 accounts will notice some changes to the interface and improvements to the Users, Groups, Integrations, Statistics and Paper Lookup sections.

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:

Background

Perhaps, like us, you’ve noticed that it is not always easy to find information on who is on a journal’s editorial board and, when you do, it is often unclear when it was last updated. The editorial board details might be displayed in multiple places (such as the publisher’s website and the platform where the content is hosted) which may or may not be in sync and retrieving this information for any kind of analysis always requires manually checking and exporting the data from a website (as illustrated by the Open Editors research and its dataset).

Some context

The Similarity Check Advisory Group met a number of times last year to discuss current and emerging originality issues with text-based content. During those meetings, the topic of image integrity was highlighted as an area of growing concern in scholarly communications, particularly in the life sciences.

Over the last few months, we have also read with interest the recommendations for handling image integrity issues by the STM Working Group on Image Alteration and Duplication Detection, followed closely image integrity sleuths such as Elizabeth Bik and have, like many of you, noticed that image manipulation is increasingly given as the reason for retractions.

Crossref Similarity Check news: iThenticate v2.0 ready for launch

Last year, we announced the upcoming launch of a new version of iThenticate, the product from Turnitin that powers Crossref Similarity Check. We know some of you have been waiting a long time for this upgrade and we are very happy to share with you that we are now ready to release it.

We will be rolling out this new version in stages, so not everyone will be able to upgrade to the new version immediately. We’ll start with new Crossref Similarity Check subscribers who use iThenticate in the browser, and one member who uses iThenticate via the eJournalPress API integration.