Duplication or plagiarism of PhD thesis will hopefully be curtailed as more and more universities are joining University Grant Commission's (UGC) initiative of installing anti-plagiarism software, an expert said here.

"In all 14 universities have already signed a memorandum of understanding and more are in the pipeline," Jagdish Arora, director, INFLIBNET (Information and Library Network), an initiative of UGC, told reporters here today.

Arora said the UGC chairman had already asked all the Universities to be the part of initiative, which will act as a deterrent for plagiarism in PhD theses.

He said till now the academicians had access only to the bibliography of the thesis and not the entire research document.

"The issue is you just don't know whether same thesis is already worked on. The guide just certifies it as a virgin topic," he said, adding that once a thesis is available online, the students themselves will be able to know whether someone has copied their research.

Arora was talking to the press on the eve of 8th International Caliber 2011 (Convention on automation of libraries in education and research) conference, which will begin tomorrow.

He said that INFLIBNET's initiative of "shodhganga" did not only help to track down the thesis but also enabled online submission of thesis and dissertations by research scholars in the digital repository.

The director said that currently there were 1,250 theses online, which were uploaded in the D-mat format.