Plagiarists beware. A group of 12 publishers have begun using CrossCheck, software that ferrets out plagiarized articles submitted for publication in scholarly journals. The software was created by CrossRef, a publishing industry association, and iParadigms, a company that sells Turnitin, software that checks student papers for plagiarized material. CrossCheck is targeted at scholars. It flags passages that a submitted journal article may have in common with published journal articles.
The publishers will contribute more than 29 million articles to the CrossCheck database, according to a statement released Monday by Elsevier. It and eight other publishers tested the service for six months.
“By creating a pooled database of articles from multiple publishers and tested tools, we can provide assistance to the scholarly community on an unprecedented scale,” Martin Tanke, Elsevier’s managing director of science-and-technology journal publishing, said in the statement.
Other publishers contributing to the CrossCheck database are: the Association of Computing Machinery, American Society of Neuroradiology, BMJ Publishing Group, International Union of Crystallography, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Sage, Informa UK, and Wiley Blackwell. —Andrea L. Foster
