Post by George Lawrence

AAAS: "Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?" Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck, + an idiotic bot may be to blame. "In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins." Impossibly, the fourth name on the small subset of Nobel laureates...was a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics + the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. "Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics." In fact, in 1933 he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews. "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." His philosophical essay from 1942 titled “Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft” (“Meaning and Limits of Exact Science”), addressed 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 [nowadays] is considered “self-plagiarism” and frowned upon today—the practice produces copyright conflicts and inflates scholars’ publication records." The Naturwissenschaften site gives “copyright violation” as the reason for the retraction. "Yet publishing identical material in multiple journals was widespread before the internet...the practice was especially common for luminaries like Planck." Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95. Goldarnit, if that don't beat all, I say—with fists clenched.