The RECEPTIO-Rossi Affair, Part VIII: Independent Fact-Checkers

I am very aware that there are many people who are not on Twitter, and are therefore not up-to-date with the recent revelations in this ongoing saga. I have not posted anything new here since 29 December, partly because the minutiae may not interest most people, and partly because it would be too time-consuming to report everything that has happened.

But it seems worth writing a new post now, because of an article published online yesterday by Peter Burger, of the Dutch fact-checking website 'News Checkers' , based at Leiden University (nieuwscheckers.nl). It is in Dutch, but Google Translate and Deepl both do a very good job of translating it into English (and, I assume, other languages).

I recommend that you read the whole article, but the "headline" revelation is that a 40-page article about Michelangelo's poetry, published in 2017 by Rossi in an online Journal of which she was "Editor in Chief", and re-distributed by her as her own work on her university website, her Academia.edu page, and her Researchgate page, is very largely copied from an article published in 2004 by Matteo Residori, an Italian scholar writing in French, now of the Sorbonne Nouvelle University.

According to the Dutch analysis, 77% of Rossi's 2017 text came from Residori's 2004 publication, and another 6% from a French scholar's work, published in 2007.

In response to this revelation, Rossi published on her Academia.edu page an image, supposedly showing an earlier version of the Michelangelo article, in which due credit is given to Residori (in red) and her own name does not appear:

[Source (archived copy)]

Needless to say, she does not cite her source for this image. Even if it does come from an earlier version of her original online publication, this does not change the fact that Residori's work is not acknowledged in this way in any of the other archived versions of the online publication, which all look like this:

[Source]

Residori's name also does not appear in the versions of the article uploaded by Rossi to her various personal and institutional websites:

Despite the concrete evidence that she has distributed this article on at least four different websites, without citing the original author in any of them, Rossi writes on her Academia.edu page:

"Qualques [sic] imbéciles, dans sa chasse aux sorcières lancée par Peter Kidd et poursuivie par des crétins sur Twitter, a cru trouver un plagiat dans cet article, auquel manque l'en-tête paru dans le magazine."

She may think that Twitter is populated only by "imbéciles" and "crétins", but it is worth emphasising that I had no part in the most recent revelations, which were entirely the result of investigations by an independent and highly-respected fact-checking organisation.

[EDIT 15 January 2023: Matteo Residori is Italian, not French as I had written in the original version of this blogpost; I have now corrected this]