Croatia's National Ministry-Funded AI-Text and Plagiarism Detection Infrastructure for Public Universities

Since academic year 2019/2020, Croatia's Ministry of Science and Education (now Ministry of Science, Education and Youth) has centrally financed unlimited-use plagiarism-detection software licences for every public higher-education institution, coordinated technically and pedagogically by SRCE, the University of Zagreb's University Computing Centre.

Provide a national, centrally funded plagiarism- and (from 2024/25) AI-text-detection infrastructure so that every public higher-education institution can check student work, with standing training and student self-check access.

At launch the Ministry reported roughly 1.9 million kuna in funding covering 72 institutions; SRCE's own usage data record 68 institutions actually using the software that first year, 52.94% choosing Turnitin over the since-discontinued PlagScan. In AY2024/2025, Turnitin's AI-generated-text detection module was added to the national licence, but only for papers written in English and Spanish, not Croatian.

Usage scaled steadily: 70 institutions used the licensed software in each academic year from 2020/21 to 2022/23, and papers checked rose from 74,711 in AY2019/2020 to 265,106 in AY2023/2024 — a 64.65% increase between AY2020/2021 and AY2023/2024 alone. By AY2023/2024, 62 of 70 public higher-education institutions (89%) had enabled students to self-check their own papers before submission, and SRCE fields roughly 300 support enquiries per year alongside standing 'Authorship, Plagiarism, and Citation' training courses.

SRCE researchers are explicit about the AI-text detector's limits: it 'cannot definitively assess whether a paper or a portion of it was written using AI; instead, they primarily indicate the possibility of AI involvement,' and results require human interpretation in disciplinary context — a candid limitation rather than an oversold accuracy claim.