Jennifer Lin

Tl;dr

Crossref is taking over the service management of Similarity Check from Turnitin. That means we’re your first port of call for questions and your agreement will be direct with us. This is a very good thing because we have agreed and will continue to agree the best possible set-up for our collective membership. Similarity Check participants need to take action to confirm the new terms with us as soon as possible and before 31st August 2019. Instructions will be circulated early June via email.

Over 100 Million unique scholarly works are distributed into systems across the research enterprise 24/7 via our APIs at a rate of around 633 Million queries a month. Crossref is broadcasting descriptions of these works (metadata) to all corners of the digital universe.

“Pre-prints” are sometimes neither Pre nor Print (c.f. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.12688/f1000research.11408.1, but they do go on and get published in journals. While researchers may have different motivations for posting a preprint, such as establishing a record of priority or seeking rapid feedback, the primary motivation appears to be timely sharing of results prior to journal publication.

So where in fact do preprints get published?

Peer review publications—not peer-reviewed publications, but peer reviews as publications

Our newest dedicated record type—peer review—has received a warm welcome from our members since rollout last November. We are pleased to formally integrate them into the scholarly record, giving the scholars who participated credit for their work, ensuring readers and systems dependably get from the reviews to the article (and vice versa), and making sure that links to these works persist over time.

The Crossref graph of the research enterprise is growing at an impressive rate of 2.5 million records a month - scholarly communications of all stripes and sizes. Preprints are one of the fastest growing types of content. While preprints may not be new, the growth may well be: ~30% for the past 2 years (compared to article growth of 2-3% for the same period). We began supporting preprints in November 2016 at the behest of our members. When members register them, we ensure that: links to these publications persist over time; they are connected to the full history of the shared research results; and the citation record is clear and up-to-date.