Turnitin announced today a partnership with CORE, a service provided by The Knowledge Media Institute, a multidisciplinary research and development lab based at The Open University in the UK in partnership with Jisc, a membership organization providing digital solutions for UK education and research. Using CORE’s FastSync service, Turnitin’s proprietary web crawler will search through CORE’s vast global database of open access content and metadata—135 million metadata records from over 3,700 data providers and counting—to check for text similarity.
Open access repositories provide free access to scholarly publications that have historically been kept behind paywalls or limited to use at a single institution. However, the scholarly publishing industry is changing, and such repositories are becoming increasingly more popular among higher education institutions choosing to make published research articles freely accessible. As the use of open access repositories grows, so do associated risks because the open nature of this content makes it vulnerable to intentional and unintentional plagiarism.
Turnitin’s partnership with CORE not only adds to Turnitin’s content database but also represents an important step in protecting open access content from misuse. In gathering the majority of its open access metadata from CORE, Turnitin is crawling the latest open access content and adding it into its database, providing the most up-to-date protection for authors and institutions.
“At CORE, we believe that facilitating machine access to scholarly literature from data providers globally will enable companies like Turnitin to do their work more effectively,” said Dr. Petr Knoth, Senior Research Fellow in Text and Data Mining at The Knowledge Media Institute and Founder and Head of CORE. “As a company deeply invested in research integrity, we appreciate Turnitin’s commitment to safeguarding the originality of scholarly articles and open access content.”
“As the scholarly publishing industry evolves, Turnitin’s services must similarly adapt,” said Valerie Schreiner, Turnitin SVP Business and Corporate Development. “This partnership with CORE ensures that our database remains at the forefront of publishing trends and can continue to best serve the needs of our customers and partners.”
The 6th Annual World Conference on Research Integrity, June 2-5, 2019 in Hong Kong (www.wcri2019.org), will explore new challenges in academic and research integrity.