In June 2008, a new antiplagiarism initiative, CrossCheck® (Publishers International Linking Association, Lynnfield, MA), was launched by CrossRef®—a nonprofit organization that has a cross-publisher linking service. Unlike previous plagiarism detection tools, which are limited by what content individual systems have access to, CrossCheck® allows publishers to check their own content against that within the CrossCheck® database.

Cheating is a central theme of a year-old publication called the Journal of College and Character. Its current issue features two studies on the topic. One looks at college honour codes, which are popular in the US and are poised to sprout in the UK and elsewhere. Rodney Arnold, of the College of the Ozarks, together with Barbara Martin, Michael Jinks and Linda Bigby, of the University of Central Missouri, surveyed students at six colleges in the American midwest.