I guess the #Rossi affair will be an unpleasant surprise for some institutions here in Switzerland after the holidays… As @martinsteiger put it, “What began as ordinary case of plagiarism, has now become an actual scientific thriller.”

@true_mxp @martinsteiger
Is this the business prof at St. Gallen? "Scientific thriller"?!?

@shriramk @martinsteiger No, this time it’s a romance philology “titularprofessor” at #UZH (at least formerly). The starting point was this blog post by Peter Kidd: https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/nobody-cares-about-your-blog.html…

@shriramk @martinsteiger This is already bad enough, but it then turned out that Rossi had set up a foundation in Ticino and a variety of dubious foundations and companies (with an accommodation address in London). The “employees” seem to be either family or fake (with stock photo portraits), plus some real academics, who are probably unaware of what's going on.

@shriramk @martinsteiger The book projects of Prof. Rossi (with her own “publisher”) have been funded by the SNSF with grants for OA book publications.

@shriramk @martinsteiger While the discussion was ongoing on Twitter and Mastodon, pictures and affiliations disappeared from the Website, names changed, facsimiles in the book changed.