Plagiarists beware. A group of 12 publishers have begun using CrossCheck, software that ferrets out plagiarized articles submitted for publication in scholarly journals. The software was created by CrossRef, a publishing industry association, and iParadigms, a company that sells Turnitin, software that checks student papers for plagiarized material. CrossCheck is targeted at scholars. It flags passages that a submitted journal article may have in common with published journal articles.

The publishers will contribute more than 29 million articles to the CrossCheck database, according to a statement released Monday by Elsevier. It and eight other publishers tested the service for six months.