Crossref Similarity Check vs Dolos

Crossref Similarity Check is a paid plagiarism-screening service for Crossref members. It compares submitted manuscripts with academic publications and general web content, using Turnitin’s iThenticate software. Reports provide a Similarity Score and highlight matching passages for editorial review. Crossref says the comparison database contains over 78 million full-text scholarly content items. Editors can submit manuscripts in iThenticate or through a manuscript system using the API, then receive an immediate report describing potential matches and overlap. Membership includes read-only database access, discounted checking fees, unlimited organizational users, and enhanced text matches in Document Viewer. Participation requires Crossref membership, active publication of DOI-assigned content, and full-text URLs in metadata. The annual service fee is $40 a year, representing 20% of the membership fee. Per-document checking is free for the first 100 documents yearly, then volume-tier charges apply to documents up to 25,000 words.

Dolos is a free, open-source tool for finding similarities between source-code submissions, particularly for teachers reviewing tests, exams, and exercises where collaboration may be allowed in small groups. Its analysis process tokenizes files, fingerprints token sequences, indexes matches, and produces reports. For each file pair, reports include similarity, total overlap, and the longest matching fragment. Dolos uses Tree-sitter parsers and supports languages including Bash, C, C++, C#, Elm, JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, and TypeScript. The web app accepts ZIP files and detects languages from file extensions; in mixed-language archives, it analyzes only the dominant language unless a language is selected. Its public API accepts ZIP submissions up to 10 MB, with the CLI or library recommended for larger submissions. Analyses can also run locally, with results displayed in a browser, or on a self-hosted server. The free web app is hosted on Ghent University servers in Belgium. Dolos provides a JSON API for integrations such as Dodona and lists CSV as a report export format.