A federal court has ordered a “romance philologist” to repay the Swiss National Science Foundation roughly $51,000 after the group found the author responsible for “massive” scientific misconduct in two grant-funded books.
Carla Rossi, scientific director of the Centro Scaligero degli Studi Danteschi in Verona, Italy, must repay the funding due to extensive plagiarism discovered in the texts, according to the decision by the Federal Administrative Court of Switzerland, released in January. Rossi also is barred from applying for grant funding from the foundation for five years, according to the ruling. Rossi is founder and director of Institut d’Estudis Filològics Dantescs i Digitals Avançats in Barcelona and also director of the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition (RECEPTIO) in Switzerland, which operates an academic press that has published Rossi’s works.
The Swiss body issued the funding ban in 2024 and ordered Rossi to repay grants for a total of three books after finding a pattern of plagiarism and lack of transparency during the grant application process, according to a summary in the court decision. Rossi took the foundation to court over the findings, arguing it reviewed incorrect versions of her books and suggesting other versions circulating on the Internet were altered or manipulated by third parties.
However, judges said the versions available from Rossi’s own publishing house were “current and correct” at the time, and that results from the Wayback Machine “clearly show that the publications existed prior to the complainant’s posts” and were not altered afterward.
“Given the very high number of instances of plagiarism, the complainant’s issue is not merely poor citation practice, but a fundamentally flawed understanding of what constitutes plagiarism,” judges wrote in the decision, according to a machine translation.
Judges noted that Rossi’s “Book 2” contained “massive scientific misconduct,” including passages matching other publications and self-plagiarism in which Rossi reproduced a 44-page article she previously published as a full chapter in the book without proper citation. In “Book 3,” 30% of the text was plagiarized, including multiple sections copied verbatim from third parties or with only minor modifications without properly citing sources, according to the court.
The court however, set aside the order for “Book 1” because “only a small portion of the scientific work was taken from third parties without proper citation” and the plagiarism was considered minor, judges concluded.
Rossi declined to comment through her attorney. She has appealed the decision to the Federal Supreme Court, according to court records.
In a statement on her website, Rossi addressed the court’s decision about “Book 1,” writing the proceedings related to The Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy, are “definitively closed.”
“The Court annulled the revocation, ordered by the Swiss National Science Foundation, of the research grant associated with this book and established that there were no grounds to qualify the work as plagiarised nor to impose any sanctions,” Rossi wrote in the statement. “The decision brings to an end a public narrative that had been constructed on the basis of materials and statements circulated online … which found no legal confirmation in the Court’s judgment.”
Rossi’s statement makes no mention of the plagiarism and repayment decision upheld by the court for her other two books.
A spokesperson for the foundation told us it “welcomes the decision of the Swiss Federal Administrative Court,” but noted the proceedings have not yet been legally concluded and are pending before the Swiss Federal Supreme Court.
Rossi came on our radar in 2022 when the University of Zurich in Switzerland announced it was investigating the then-adjunct professor. The inquiry, first reported by kath.ch, followed accusations by Peter Kidd, an independent scholar who blogs at Medieval Manuscripts Provenance, that Rossi appeared to use his text and images in her book without attribution. The book, The Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy: a.k.a. The Courtanvaux-Elmhirst Hours, Digitally Restored Through the Wayback Recovery Method, describes a manuscript that Rossi purported to have digitally reconstructed.
Kidd declined to comment.
A spokesperson for the University of Zurich told us its investigation into Rossi “has not yet been concluded.”
“We are therefore unable to provide any information regarding the ongoing proceedings or their timeframe,” the spokesperson wrote in an email, adding Rossi is no longer affiliated with the university.
While the court decision doesn’t name the three books in question, it notes SNSF’s preliminary investigation into Rossi was prompted by allegations “made in the media” regarding “Book 1.” The decision states “Book 2” was approved for grant funding by SNSF on Jan. 12, 2022 and the foundation approved “Book 3” on Oct. 29, 2020.
SNSF records show the foundation awarded Rossi two grants in those timeframes: one for 25,000 Swiss francs, about US $32,000, that started on Jan. 31, 2022, for the book, Bronzino the Poet (Vol. I): The Poetic Activity of a Master of the Florentine Renaissance, and another grant of 15,000 Swiss francs, roughly US $19,000, that started on Oct. 31, 2020, for the book, On the Italian-Swiss Border, 1943–1945: The Uncertain Fate of Some Jewish Refugees.
Since the plagiarism allegations arose in 2022, Rossi has vehemently defended her work on various platforms, calling the accusations a “digital defamation campaign” based on unfounded accusations. In 2025, an author named Jordi Puig published a book about the “campaign aimed at discrediting” Rossi, which included a “comprehensive chronology of the smear campaign,” and “a final manifesto advocating for manuscript ethics in the digital age,” according to the books’ description.
Puig is described on Academia.edu as a retired art conservator and an alumnus of Institut d’Estudis Filològics i Dantescos, which Rossi founded. We could not find contact information for Puig.
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Decisions from Swiss courts on matters of scientific integrity really can’t be trusted. Just ask Dr. Solal Pirelli how the Swiss legal systems value the truth.