The peer-review process is at the heart of the success of scientific publishing. As part of our commitment to the protection and enhancement of the peer-review process, Elsevier has an obligation to assist the scientific community in all aspects of publishing ethics, especially in cases of (suspected) duplicate submission or plagiarism.

Our journal editors frequently ask us how we can support them by using software to detect plagiarism. We take their concerns regarding plagiarism issues very seriously, and we would like to address this need, but it is important to point out that simple or imminent solutions do not exist. We are currently investigating new ways of detecting plagiarism and are exploring the effectiveness of plagiarism-detection software. For example, we are one of the first participants in the CrossCheck pilot, as described below.

Investing in plagiarism-detection software

Cases of suspected plagiarism (or duplicate submission) are rarely limited to the same journal or publisher. More often than not, multiple journals and publishers are involved. Software solutions, therefore, ideally require cooperation between (all) publishing houses. We, together with other publishers, started collaboration with CrossRef in 2008 to develop a system that allows publishers to verify the originality of published works. The service is called CrossCheck. It involves software from iParadigms, known for providing plagiarism software to the academic world. CrossRef members co-operate to maintain a single database of published articles (perhaps later also to include submitted articles) against which checking can take place.

Elsevier has contributed nearly nine million journal articles to the CrossCheck database, which now covers over 22 million journal articles from publishers including the Association for Computing Machinery, American Society of Neuroradiology, BMJ Publishing Group, Elsevier, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, International Union of Crystallography, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Sage, Informa UK (Taylor & Francis), Springer, American Institute of Physics and Wiley Blackwell.

Finally, at Elsevier, we devote many resources to supporting our editors in following up on suspected plagiarism, duplicate submissions, or falsifications. We provide support for more than 400 cases per year. We are committed to continuing this level of support. Although we estimate only 0.1% of submitted articles are ever suspect--with considerable variation of occurrence between different academic areas--a workable software solution for plagiarism detection can lower the burden on our editors and pay off in terms of resources required to detect plagiarism. We recognize this burden and are committed to searching for the best solutions.

One of Elsevier's core tasks is supporting our editors by supporting and fostering the peer-review process. We have an ongoing commitment to safeguard the ethics of publishing and a responsibility to strive to prevent or minimize all aspects of unethical publishing behavior.