Post by Miguel Bronchud

Are we going too far retracting published papers because of “self plagiarism”? Radical algorithms are also questionable? Some perhaps “over zealous editorial policies”? The intellectual “pendulum” in search of a new equilibrium? Interesting to read in the recent journal Science a nice paper on “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn? https://lnkd.in/eVe3cH29 After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Not only that, accounting to widespread belief it was Max Planck to accept as an editor the publication of a strange paper (turned down by others?) on the General Relativity Theory by an unknown author (not academic and apparently working in a patent office?) called Albert Einstein. Some authors later wrote that “it definitely takes a genius to recognize another genius”. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as for his physics. In 1933, for example, Max , already highly respected in Germany and elsewhere, bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews. Gingras called up Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières. “There’s something fishy,” Gingras said. The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, originally appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by publishing giant Springer Nature. After some sleuthing, Khelfaoui determined that one of the Planck pieces, a 1942 essay titled “Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft” (“Meaning and Limits of Exact Science”), about how to achieve certainty in scientific knowledge, had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books. Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered “self-plagiarism” and frowned upon today—the practice may (“perhaps”) produce copyright conflicts and inflates scholars’ publication records - or simply reflects on the need of authors, in their often isolated context, to reach different kinds of readers and to share their challenging thought and experience (or unusual findings). The Naturwissenschaften site gave “copyright violation” as the reason for the retraction. The practice was especially common for luminaries like Planck. Albert Einstein did the same (but escaped retractions). Springer Nature’s “anachronistic” application of modern standards to a 1942 paper “distort[s] the historical record,” Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in a preprint posted last month on arXiv. Concerns about copyright are largely moot anyway: Because Planck died in 1947, his works are in the public domain in most countries.