“#ReceptioGate and the (absolute) State of Academia: The Numbers Game Has Incentivized Bad Behavior”, 2023-01-04 ():
[more] Our story begins with Peter Kidd, a researcher specialising in medieval manuscripts, who found that his work had apparently been plagiarized by one Dr Carla Rossi of an obscure Swiss “research institute” called Receptio. In a recent publication, Rossi used not only written descriptions, but also images of manuscript fragments identical to materials from Kidd’s well-known website, representing them as her own work of “reconstructing” a manuscript using a proprietary scholarly method. Kidd contacted Receptio to ask for an explanation and received a diatribe from her “secretary” threatening legal action in reply.
Kidd documented the threatening response from Receptio, and some of the evidence for Rossi’s appropriation of his research, on his blog. This is where
#ReceptioGatetook off: Kidd’s Twitter followers began to notice that certain elements of Receptio’s website were suspect. For a start, many of the photos of its so-called staff & board members were stock photos that had been taken off the internet and Photoshopped onto a consistent background. No independent evidence could be found that most of them—including the “secretary” who had threatened Kidd with legal action—ever existed. Receptio’s London address was revealed to be a registered office home to 268 other companies; office photos on the institute website were likewise phony.In revenge, Rossi’s husband David La Monaca—one of the few staff listed on the Receptio website who actually appears to exist—set up a Twitter account and email bot to spam Kidd with angry messages under the name “John Does”. Unfortunately, IT guy La Monaca neglected to consider that the email headers showed precisely who had set up the spam bot; the reply-to email address was his own. La Monaca couldn’t even bother writing his own threatening copy: at least one email was produced using ChatGPT.
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