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Information Today October 1, 2007 CrossRef: a new tool to detect plagiarism; copyright management software Brynko, Barbara Pg. 38(1) Vol. 24 No. 9 ISSN: 8755-6286 658 words For some researchers, reading a familiar passage in a scholarly orprofessional journal may not be a case of deja vu. It could be a case of plagiarism. The incidences of plagiarism in scholarly or professional literature are frequent enough to cause publishers some concern, and publishers are now finding new ways to protect their authors and their scientific reputations. One such tool, called CrossCheck, is a new creationfrom CrossRef that's designed to spot plagiarism at a variety of critical points in the publishing process. "Some of CrossRef's publisher members report a sharp increase in plagiarism in recent years," said Amy Brand, director of business and product development at CrossRef, "obviously as a result of how easy it is to copy parts or whole sections of text that is accessed online." Although no current statistics are available, the decision to move ahead with CrossCheck was due to membership demand, she said. The pilot was officially launched in August with seven publishers on board: the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM); BMJ Publishing Group Ltd. (BMJ); Elsevier; the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE); Taylor & Francis; Wiley-Blackwell; and International Union of Crystallography. But before the production service launches at the end of 2007 or early 2008, Brand explained that indexing is now under way, and publishers will be testing the service as part of their editorial workflow and submitting ongoing feedback to CrossRef to refine the tool even more. "There was immediate interest and buy-in on the part of several large publishers," said Brand. "The impetus really came from them, so this was not a hard sell on CrossRef 's part." She said that CrossRef presents possible new developments and projects to members each year,and this initiative generated interest among CrossRef's membership. CrossRef's mission is "to enable easy identification and use of trustworthy electronic content by promoting the cooperative developmentand application of a sustainable infrastructure." For CrossCheck's creation and development, CrossRef, a nonprofit association of membersand directed by publishers, teamed up with iParadigms, a company that provides Web-based solutions to check documents for originality andplagiarism. Among iParadigms' top plagiarism-detection tools on the market is Turnitin (an Internet service to assess academic works used by students and faculty) and iThenticate (an Internet service that lets enterprises assess the originality of documents and check for any misappropriations). John Barrie, CEO of iParadigms, said he sees CrossCheck "as the next logical evolution of the technology behind Turnitin--a service that has already become part of how secondary and higher education work." Since CrossCheck can be used at several different points during the evaluation of submitted manuscripts as well as during postproduction, Brand said she sees "CrossCheck as part of a broader effort to provide editorial tools to publishers. And just how does CrossCheck detect plagiarized passages? "The checking itself involves test fingerprinting," said Brand. "A document is de-composed into short, normalized substrings [that] are then compared against a database of pre-indexed documents." The database, she explained, will consist of the publishers' full-text documents, in addition to more than 8 million pages of current and archived Web content that iParadigms has already indexed. While much of the process is automated, the output of the check is an "originality report," which still must be interpreted by a real person. As for dealing with plagiarism (whether accidental or intentional)when and if it's detected? "It is entirely up to publishers to decide how to handle the incidences of plagiarism that are discovered using this tool," said Brand. But she added that CrossRef could eventually help develop standard practices as experience with the service grows over time. January 12, 2008 ENGLISH ACC-NO: 169755232 Magazine JOURNAL-CODE: 3336 ASAP Copyright 2007 Gale Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved ASAP Copyright 2007 Information Today, Inc.