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Policy

ACS Journals Begin Screening For Plagiarism

by Linda Wang
October 28, 2013 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 91, Issue 43

In an effort to prevent plagiarism, the American Chemical Society Publications Division began implementing a service called CrossCheck this past July. The online tool will help journal editors screen manuscripts submitted for review against CrossCheck’s growing repository of published scholarly work, to which ACS journals are now being added.

“We have a responsibility to protect the integrity of the scientific record as well as the copyright of the journals that we publish,” says Anne Coghill, manager of peer review operations for ACS ­Publications.

ACS, which publishes C&EN, began piloting the use of CrossCheck in 2011. It completed rollout of the service to all its journals this past September. The tool was created by CrossRef, a nonprofit ­association of publishers including ACS, and uses iParadigms’s iThenticate software.

Joan F. Brennecke, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data, which began using CrossCheck in 2011, says she has already seen a decline in the rare instances of plagiarism among manuscripts that are submitted for review. She attributes the drop to authors becoming more aware of what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.

The most common form of plagiarism she sees is self-plagiarism, where an author will reuse text that he or she has already used in other journal articles. “This is helping us make the whole research enterprise not only more ethical but more creative,” Brennecke says.

Announcements of ACS news may be sent to acsnews.cen@acs.org.

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