As we finish celebrating our 25th anniversary, we can look back on a truly transformational year, defined by the successful delivery of several long-planned, foundational projects—as well as updates to our teams, services, and fees—that position Crossref for success over the next quarter century as essential open scholarly infrastructure. In our update at the end of 2024, we highlighted that we had restructured our leadership team and paused some projects. The changes made in 2024 positioned us for a year of getting things done in 2025. We launched cross-functional programs, modernised our systems, strengthened connections with our growing global community, and streamlined a bunch of technical and business operations while continuing to grow our staff, members, content, relationships, and community connections.
Crossref turned twenty-five this year, and our 2025 Annual Meeting became more than a celebration—it was a shared moment to reflect on how far open scholarly infrastructure has come and where we, as a community, are heading next.
Over two days in October, hundreds of participants joined online and in local satellite meetings in Madrid, Nairobi, Medan, Bogotá, Washington D.C., and London––a reminder that our community spans the globe. The meetings offered updates, community highlights, and a look at what’s ahead for our shared metadata network––including plans to connect funders, platforms, and AI tools across the global research ecosystem.
In my latest conversations with research funders, I talked with Hannah Hope, Open Research Lead at Wellcome, and Melissa Harrison, Team Leader of Literature Services at Europe PMC. Wellcome and Europe PMC are working together to realise the potential of funding metadata and the Crossref Grant Linking System for, among other things, programmatic grantee reporting. In this blog, we explore how this partnership works and how the Crossref Grant Linking System is supporting Wellcome in realising their Open Science vision.
In January 2026, our new annual membership fee tier takes effect. The new tier is US$200 for member organisations that operate on publishing revenue or expenses (whichever is higher) of up to US$1,000 annually. We announced the Board’s decision, making it possible in July, and––as you can infer from Amanda’s latest blog––this is the first such change to the annual membership fee tiers in close to 20 years!
The new fee tier resulted from the consultation process and fees review undertaken as part of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability program, carried out with the help of our Membership and Fees Committee (made up of representatives from member organisations and community partners). The program is ongoing, and the new fee tier, intended to make Crossref membership more accessible, is one of the first changes it helped us determine.
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 Turnitin’s 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, ‘Further Acknowledgments’).
