Nov. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Harvard University has become the first Ivy League institution to license anti-plagiarism software, the president of the software company said today.

Harvard College, the university's undergraduate school, licensed the software in the first weeks of September and has made it available to all of the faculty, according to John Barrie, president of iParadigms LLC, the Oakland, California- based company that makes Turnitin.com.

The contract, signed in early September, follows a series of plagiarism scandals at Harvard, including one involving a student novelist and another over columns and cartoons published in the student newspaper.

``With Harvard's decision, the message is now broadcast in spades,'' Barrie said in a telephone interview today. ``Plagiarism software and Turnitin are now part of how education works.''

Harvard spokesman Robert Mitchell today confirmed the contract with Turnitin and said the faculty will roll out the software's use on a department-by-department basis in the college, which has 6,613 students. Mitchell said he did not know why Harvard chose to adopt the software.

Sociology 189, ``Law and Social Movements,'' is using the Turnitin software this term after a faculty member requested it, Mitchell said.

A university assistant dean, John Ellison, had told Bloomberg News in early September that using anti-plagiarism software would undermine the trust between teachers and students.

Campus Culture

He also said that a campus culture of academic integrity makes the software unnecessary, and that Harvard did not want to make student papers available in a database. iParadigms has 22 million student papers in its database.

``Harvard deserves credit for being willing to run the obvious risk of negative public relations for testing Turnitin after their earlier comments,'' said Donald McCabe, professor of global management at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and an authority on plagiarism on college campuses and at high schools.

The decision to try Turnitin, the most widely used plagiarism detection software package among universities, comes as the Crimson, the student newspaper, last month canceled two editorial-page series that the paper said appeared to have borrowed from other sources.

Millions of Pages

Turnitin receives digital copies of up to 80,000 papers a day, Barrie said. The software scans each one against a daily download of 60 million Internet pages, 22 million student works in its database and 10,000 periodicals, Barrie said.

The software is used at nearly 6,000 institutions in 90 countries, according to Barrie, whose company is privately held. The U.S. clients include 1,820 colleges and universities, or 44 percent of all such schools.

McCabe said Harvard students may be less inclined to plagiarize than students at other campuses. He said that it is naive to think that Harvard students don't cheat.

``Although arguably brighter on average, Harvard students come from the same society and high schools as students attending other colleges and are subject to the same pressures,'' McCabe said in an e-mail interview today.

Barrie had said last month that when he first contacted Harvard about testing Turnitin, he thought the Cambridge, Massachusetts, institution would license the product immediately. It didn't.

No Problem?

``I used to think that the Ivy League schools, including Harvard, Princeton and Yale, would be our first clients because they have such a reputation to protect,'' Barrie said. ``But they insisted plagiarism was not a problem on their campuses.''

Currently, Barrie said, the only solution to reducing plagiarism is software that will scan student papers and induce students to toe the line.

``Anybody who thinks there is another solution to this problem -- better teaching methods, honor codes, harsher punishments, tougher grades -- has their head in the sand,'' Barrie said. ``All of those things are the status quo.''

Barrie said that iParadigms has had a 95 percent contract renewal rate. He also said that the company, incorporated in 1998 after the creation of Turnitin in the mid-1990s, has studied plagiarism rates among renewing schools and found an 82 percent reduction among those that have renewed for five years or more.

Past Harvard Cases

In recent weeks, the Harvard Crimson newspaper has withdrawn the work of a student cartoonist and retracted a column by another student.

Student Kaavya Viswanathan's first novel, ``How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life'' was pulled from stores earlier this year by publisher Little Brown after it was discovered the book contained passages from several others.

Law professors Laurence Tribe and Charles Ogletree have also apologized in the past two years for failing to attribute the work of others in books they published.

Of 56,611 undergraduates surveyed in a 2005 study by Duke University's Center for Academic Integrity, 37 percent admitted copying Internet material without attribution, compared with 10 percent in 1999.

To contact the reporter on this story: Emily Sachar in New York at esachar@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 2, 2006 16:50 EST