The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) has earned recognition in Crossref’s Participation Reports for its exceptional metadata coverage among large publishing members––an achievement built on intentional change, technical investment, and collaborative work. In this Q&A, the ASM team shares what that journey looked like, the challenges they’ve tackled, and how centering metadata has helped them better connect research with the global scientific community.
The Crossref Board recently approved three recommendations for changes to our fees: introduction of a new lowest membership fee tier, removal of volume discounts for record registration, and normalisation of registration fees for peer reviews. The changes will be applied from January 2026.
This is the first outcome of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) program, launched in 2023, as a comprehensive effort to review all aspects of Crossref revenue and how we’re adapting to growth and the diversification of our membership. The program aims to make fees more equitable, simplify our complex fee schedule, and rebalance revenue sources.
This June, we presented at the Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) and connected directly with our growing community in China. With a surge of interest from Chinese publishers and partners, it was clear: there’s a strong and rising curiosity around how metadata plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record.
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 iThenticate 2.0.
Within a folder, the Documents tab shows all the submitted documents for that folder.
Each document submitted generates a Similarity Report after the document has been through the Similarity Check. If more documents are present than can be displayed at once, the pages feature will appear beneath the documents - click the page number to display, or click Next to move to the next page of documents.
zip file upload - to submit a zip file containing multiple documents, up to a maximum of 100MB or 1,000 files. Larger files may take longer to upload
cut & paste - to submit text directly into the submission box. Use this to copy and paste a submission from a file format that is not supported. This method supports plain text only (no images or non-text information)
iThenticate currently accepts the following file types for document upload:
Microsoft Word® (.doc and .docx)
Word XML
plain text (.txt)
Adobe PostScript®
Portable Document Format (.pdf)
HTML
Corel WordPerfect® (.wpd)
Rich Text Format (.rtf)
Each file may not exceed 400 pages, and each file size may not exceed 100 MB. Reduce the size of larger files by removing non-text content. You can’t upload or submit to iThenticate files that are password-protected, encrypted, hidden, system files, or read-only.
.pdf documents must contain text - if they contain only images of text, they will be rejected during the upload attempt. To check, copy and paste a section of the .pdf into a plain-text editor such as Microsoft Notepad® or Apple TextEdit®. If no text is copied over, the selection does not contain text.
To convert scanned images of a document, or an image saved as a .pdf, use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to convert the image to text. The conversion software can introduce errors, so manually check and correct the converted document.
Some document formats can contain multiple data types, such as text, images, embedded information from another file, and formatting. Non-text information that is not saved directly within the document will not be included in a file upload, for example, references to a Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet included within a Microsoft Office Word® document.
Use a word-processing program to save your file as one of the accepted types listed above, such as .rtf or .txt. Neither file type supports images or non-text data within the file. Plain text format does not support any formatting, and rich text format allows only limited formatting.
When converting a file to a new format, save it with a different name from the original, to avoid accidentally overwriting the original file. This is especially important when converting to plain text or rich text formats, to prevent permanent loss of the original formatting or image content of the file.
Page maintainer: Kathleen Luschek Last updated: 2020-May-19