Can Another Instructor Read Your Turnitin Paper? Paper View Requests Explained

A match between your paper and another student's paper does not give the other instructor access to your full text. Turnitin's official process — the paper view request — sends a request email on the instructor's behalf to the institution that hosts the matching paper, and that institution decides whether to share anything at all. If it shares, identifying information is removed first. Your paper's copyright stays with you the whole time; Turnitin itself never hands over the document.

Turnitin's guide (guides.turnitin.com, "Paper view requests") gives the reason in one line:

"All intellectual property rights remain with the student when they submit their paper, making Turnitin unable to offer immediate access to papers or handle the paper exchange directly."

"We send an email on your behalf to the host institution."

So the company that runs the matching can't do the exchange itself. What it does is act as the initial mail carrier: an instructor who sees a strong match can select the match, click "Submitted to [Host Institution]," and Turnitin sends a request email to the course instructor or privacy officer at the host institution.

• 1. Match identified. In the Match Overview, an instructor sees a strong match to a paper hosted at another institution and clicks the "Submitted to [Host Institution]" link.
• 2. Request email sent. Turnitin sends an email to the host's instructor or privacy officer — possibly a generic address the account administrator configured.
• 3. Host decides. "Permission to view the paper lies entirely within the institution. Their privacy rules may be such that they cannot share the paper outside of the institution." The guide also says: "While Turnitin encourages instructors to collaborate and work together with paper view requests, you are under no obligation to respond."
• 4. If approved, a de-identified copy. The host replies with the paper in plain text, with identifying information removed (Lincoln's guidance: student name and ID — which may sit in declaration pages or appendices, not just the front page). "If the subject matter of the work is explicitly personal to the student, i.e. a personal reflective piece, removing all personal data may not be feasible and so the paper should not be shared."

From step 3 onward, communication is between the two instructors directly — Turnitin is out of the loop, and "If you do not receive a reply, Turnitin cannot pursue a paper view request any further."

The official guide describes the email: a brief recap of the assignment (title, submission date, class title) as originally submitted, plus basic information about the matching paper — the requesting instructor's name and the similarity percentage. A full plain-text version of the original paper is included in the email to the host instructor (that's the copy they can decide to forward). The requester gets nothing until the host replies.

Some institutions add another layer — York's official guidance describes an external request needing a written commitment on the purpose (establishing academic misconduct), confidentiality, and destruction of the material once the investigation completes. That's the norm, not paranoia: sharing is a controlled exception, and both sides treat it that way.

Inside the same institution the process can be skipped entirely:

"As an optional feature, the administrator for your account may have activated Submission Release. This feature allows other instructors associated with your institution to view papers submitted to your classes without having to go through the paper view request process."

With Submission Release on, a colleague at the same university can directly access or download your paper — no email, no request. It is within-institution only: across institutions, the email process above is the only path. Worth knowing, because "who can see this" is a different answer inside your university than outside it.

• A match is not an open read. Seeing "matched at [Another University]" in a report or inbox does not mean that instructor can open your essay. The default is: they can't, without a request and your institution's approval.
• De-identification before sharing is the rule. If your institution ever shares, the copy carries no name, no ID, no personal identifying details — and personal-reflective work may not be shared at all.
• Your paper being matched implies it is in the repository. Matching requires both papers to be in the comparison database — a consequence of your school's storage setting (see our guide on retention).
• If you're asked to explain a match to an unfamiliar source, the source list shows one copy of the text, not the authoritative origin (see our guide on unmatched unknown sources); the request process explains how the other side could (rarely) get more.
• Nothing about this process obligates you to respond. The university receiving a request can decline; the university requesting gets a reply only if the host chooses to share.

The paper view request is a controlled, email-based, de-identification-first process — Turnitin can't hand over papers, your institution decides whether anything is shared, and any shared copy strips out identifying information and may require written commitments on purpose and destruction. Cross-institution visibility outside this process is the exception (Submission Release, inside one institution), not the rule. If a report ever shows your paper matched at another school, the honest reading is not "someone can now read it" but "a controlled request may be possible — and that's exactly how far it goes."