The Lausanne municipal court is also responsible for deciding when criticising scientific practices amounts to defamation. | Photo: provided by subject

On 20 June 2025, as reported by the newspaper ‘24 Heures’, Solal Pirelli was convicted of defamation by a municipal court in Lausanne. He is a former doctoral student of EPFL in information sciences, and his offence was having published a blog post online about questionable citation practices. A court document since released by Retraction Watch has revealed that Professor Shadi Aljawarneh of the Jordan University of Science and Technology had complained one year earlier that the blog had seriously damaged his professional reputation.

In his blog, Pirelli had accused Aljawarneh of having artificially increased his citation figures by organising conferences whose published proceedings cited a disproportionate number of articles by him and one of his colleagues. He also claimed that the two of them had elsewhere cited themselves disproportionately often. In Pirelli’s view, by inflating his scholarly output, Aljawarneh had succeeded in getting appointed to specific positions. It’s become a side-job of Pirelli’s to reveal questionable scientific practices. According to 24 Heures, his work has prompted the Association for Computing Machinery to launch an investigation, cancel a conference, and eject Aljawarneh from the editorial board of a journal.

Aljawarneh’s complaint was initially rejected. But he appealed successfully in Lausanne and it was ultimately upheld. Pirelli was sentenced to a fine in lieu of 50 days in jail at a rate of CHF 100 per day, plus a separate fine of CHF 400. He also has to pay Aljawarneh’s legal costs, which amount to CHF 5,000. Martin Vetterli, a former president of EPFL, testified in Pirelli’s favour: “We are happy that there are people willing to assume the risk of exposing these problematic cases”, he said. However, the plaintiff’s lawyer has now announced that they intend to take EPFL to task too: “They have tolerated the presence of people among their employees who are activists, not scientists”. Pirelli is unimpressed. His blog post is still online and he intends to appeal against the judgement.