Journals step up plagiarism policing

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Major science publishers are gearing up to fight plagiarism. The publishers, including Elsevier and Springer, are set to roll out software across their journals that will scan submitted papers for identical or paraphrased chunks of text that appear in previously published articles.

The move follows pilot tests of the software that have confirmed high levels of plagiarism in articles submitted to some journals, according to an informal survey by Nature of nine science publishers. Incredibly, one journal reported rejecting 23% of accepted submissions after checking for plagiarism.

Over the past two years, many publishers (including Nature Publishing Group) have been trialling CrossCheck, a plagiarism checking service launched in June 2008 by CrossRef, a non-profit collaboration of 3,108 commercial and learned society publishers.

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