A Russell Group university is considering cancelling its Turnitin licence owing to long-running ¡°operational difficulties¡± with the plagiarism detection service.

California-based Turnitin counts 98 per cent of the UK¡¯s higher education institutions among its subscribers, but the University of Glasgow is the first in the country to sign up with Urkund, a Swedish rival.

At the moment the university is using both systems, but ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ understands that Glasgow will cut its ties with Turnitin if the Urkund trial proves successful.

Urkund says that it is discussing prices with a further three UK universities, and that about half a dozen are currently trialling its product.

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A spokesman for Glasgow said the potential switch reflected concerns about the performance of Turnitin, which THE reported on last year.

¡°We have experienced some operational difficulties with Turnitin over the last few years and so we have been looking at alternatives,¡± the spokesman said. ¡°We have undertaken a very limited but successful pilot with Urkund and are now moving to a larger-scale evaluation exercise while, at the same time, ensuring continuity of academic activity through retaining Turnitin.

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¡°The outcomes of this exercise will have a significant bearing on our future strategy on plagiarism detection.¡±

Most of Urkund¡¯s clients are in Scandinavia, but in July the company was chosen to supply plagiarism detection to India¡¯s public universities.

Andreas Ohlson, chief executive of Urkund¡¯s holding company, Prio Infocenter, said he hoped that Glasgow¡¯s decision ¡°will influence other universities in the UK, many of which are already in discussions with us¡±.

Last year¡¯s THE article quoted concerns raised by a number of university employees on a Turnitin discussion forum about increases in subscription charges of up to 31 per cent year-on-year, and about outages in service.

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In response to those complaints, a Turnitin spokesman said that use of its service was at an all-time high, with a 400 per cent increase in submissions in the past five years and more staff and students using the service.

Many institutions had received ¡°substantial initial discounts¡±, he added, which explained why some were seeing large percentage increases.

chris.havergal@tesglobal.com