The makers of Turnitin, the anti-plagiarism software used to screen student papers (and now college application essays), has announced a new service to help scholarly journals detect plagiarism in submitted articles:

CrossRef is partnering with iParadigms, LLC to offer its members — leading scholarly and professional publishers — the opportunity to verify the originality of works submitted for publication using the iThenticate service to check against a vast database of proprietary as well as open web content. Until now, there was no automated way to check submissions against previous publications because the published literature had not been indexed and “text fingerprinted” for this purpose. The CrossCheck database will include the full-text journals of leading academic publishers, and is expected to grow very rapidly over the coming months as CrossRef member publishers sign up for the service.

(Hat Tip:  Inside Higher Ed.)