FREE PLAGARISM CHECKING TOOL

DOC Cop is a service to help people detect plagiarism. It is free (registration necessary, but all they ask is your email address); they offer a one-hour turnaround for their detailed report; it is entirely web based, no installation necessary, you can exclude repetitious text such as the question itself and include your own material (e.g., lecture notes) to be checked against the text; and it offers online support and 128-bit SSL Security and promises that submitted material will not be retained or used elsewhere.

Doc Cop offers three types of checks. DOC Check evaluates up to 5 documents, with a 250,000 word maximum, against each other. Corpus Check evaluates an unlimited number of documents, up to 12,000 words each, against one another, and Web Check which compares up to 550 words of text against the Web (limited uses per day).

I tried Web Check with materials from an article in OPL. The report (which took two hours, not the one promised) was not very detailed and found no plagiarism (surprise, surprise). The service was developed by Mark McCrohon [formerly, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia]. For more information, see the FAQ on the website or read this article.
Nagel, David, DOC Cop Delivers Free Anti-Plagiarism Tools, Campus Technology, 23 August 2007, http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/49892

The site also has plagiarism news from around the world. While limited, it seems like this could be useful for its intended audience, K-12 and higher education.

URL: http://www.doccop.com/