Turnitin and Japanese Science and Technology Agency announce content partnership

Turnitin— a leading provider of academic integrity and assessment solutions— and Japanese Science and Technology Agency (JST)—a government agency responsible for implementing science and technology policy in Japan— announced their content partnership.

The partnership aims to provide the academic and research community with a comprehensive Japanese content database to cross-check new academic content for potential plagiarism, originality, and authorship. The Japan Link Center (JaLC)—Japan’s Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration service for academic content, which JST serves as a secretariat—and JST’s online academic journal J-STAGE are contributing Japanese academic content to Turnitin’s secure and extensive scholarly database.

Turnitin’s content database helps researchers and publishers surface potential plagiarism by uploading and comparing submissions against more than 82 million scholarly articles provided and owned by the world’s premier academic publishers.

Content contributed to Turnitin by JaLC and J-STAGE includes: 1) JaLC content derived from member institutions that use Turnitin plagiarism prevention software and have had their contents’ DOIs registered through JaLC, and 2) J-STAGE content whose DOIs have been registered through JaLC. Already, over 2.6 million pieces of Japanese academic content have been added to the Turnitin database from J-STAGE.

"In October 2020, Turnitin established a Japanese entity in response to growing domestic demand from academic institutions," said Turnitin North East Asia Regional Director Betsy Matsunaga. "This partnership further exemplifies the Japanese education and research community’s commitment to academic integrity. We look forward to working with the Japan Science and Technology Agency to help ensure the integrity of academic research."

"We have received many requests from Japan Link Center members and other academic institutions in Japan to use plagiarism checking, especially for Japanese content," said Japan Link Center Steering Committee Vice Chair Ritsuko Nakajima. "We felt it necessary to respond to this request. We are very pleased to be able to offer plagiarism prevention services to Japan Link Center member institutions through this partnership. We hope that this initiative will help improve research integrity in Japan and promote the distribution of academic content originating from Japan."

About Japan Link Center

Japan Link Center (JaLC) centrally manages bibliography and location information of academic content—such as articles, books, data, dissertations, reports, e-learning, and more—in Japan. It is a system to register a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). It was certified by the DOI Foundation on March 15, 2012 as the ninth DOI registration body in the world and the only one in Japan. JaLC also collects and manages bibliographic information related to the content when registering DOIs. JaLC is jointly operated by the Japan Science and Technology Agency, the National Institute for Materials Science, the National Institute of Informatics, and the National Diet Library.

About Japan Science and Technology Agency

Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) is an organization that plays a central role in the Science and Technology Basic Plan. Based on the goals set by the government, JST comprehensively implements a variety of projects to promote science and technology and solve social issues, including basic research, fundamental research and development, support for commercialization of new technologies, distribution of scientific and technological information, and more recently, promotion of international joint research and development of next-generation human resources. As part of the distribution of scientific and technological information, JST operates the electronic journal platform J-STAGE and serves as the secretariat of the domestic Digital Object Identifier registration organization Japan Link Center.