Retraction is a major deal, and would/could do significant harm to an author (obviously in this particular case I think Max's reputation will be fine). The article states:
> Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”
but I'm pretty sure they didn't contact Max Planck, nor his estate, before retracting the articles. I would be absolutely incensed if I were a living author and had one of my papers retracted without the chance to defend myself.
I think this article encapsulates an ever growing frustration that is only exploding with the rise of AI - we're turning more and more decisions over to black boxes that have no accountability and no easy path for rectification when things go wrong.
The system is broken
In 2014 MPDL purchase 110k out-of-print and historically significant titles. In 2015 Springer acquired open-access journals from Max Plank Society. In 2022 There was an open-access book deal allowing Plank Institute members to more easily publish books.
Things were more not always so intertwined and in 2007 the Society canceled a licensing agreement with Springer due to subscription prices and usage restrictions.
Why? Max Plank (the dead Physicist) has nothing to do with whatever the Institute is doing these days. Or the library. Or anything that was named after him.
He should have known better. </sarc>
For profit journals need to die.
There is almost zero reasons why the governments or NIH-like institutions don't have their paper repository.
> There is almost zero reasons why the governments or NIH-like institutions don't have their paper repository.
it's designed that way.
Most everyone and everything has been captured by the ultimate cynicism of Capitalism: if I don’t do it someone else will, so might as well put the money in my pocket right??
I agree with @kingleopod — this system is designed to do what it is doing: keep knowledge private and keep profits high. Full stop.
(Yes, they are morons because no reasonable person would think this is fair. You need convoluted nonsense arguments to justify this)
Repeating a phrase or two in a document's introduction isn't going to raise flags from any serious people, but copying data, analysis, or large swaths of text? That's a paddlin'.
I can also appreciate that in a "publishing papers as research" context you're completely right.
I think you are contradicting yourself. If a previous work has been copy and pasted, and a novel reader doesn't know, wouldn't the reader benefit from the option to actually read the previous work as a whole?
All credible authors I read mentioned quotes from earlier works. In fact, that is on the one hand an ego boost as a prolific writer, and also helps sell more copies in case of being purchasable.
Most credible university profs in Germany from the 1990th for example always referenced their former work and mention changes of the context, or in case of a theory, modifications.
Books for example, are reprinted and it has been mentioned whether changes to the content has been done.
Personally I really see no problem, leaving the decision, whether you copied something or not, to the reader.
Yes, maybe from the "plagiarism" angle is not very relevant, but I would prefer not to have a system in which people try to "flood" repositories (journals, etc) with the same thing over and over. People looking for new information, people reviewing will get most of the burden to "keep things clean" while for the poster that is not a problem.
Just mark it, it'll take seconds.
The expectation is you cite the previous work to clearly indicate it is not new, and that your submission for review is mostly about new research. In some situations overlap is okay, e.g. there's a conference version and then a journal version with additional results. In that case you disclose in writing what the delta is to the editor (who knows your identity while the reviewers do not). This also means in the paper you have to treat the prior work as if it is by a different group to maintain double-blind review.
The point is to make it clear what is new research. Trying to get credit for the same research multiple times, and boost citation count, is dishonest to the expectations of the community. It's also a waste of time for reviewers (who volunteer) to review same research over and over again after deciding it's acceptable. Think of it like a OSS maintainer getting pull requests for trivial changes to the code just to boost the green squares on someone's GitHub profile. It's a drain on everyone else and doesn't benefit the project.
It should be no surprise that republishing in multiple journals was accepted in the pre-computer era, where citations were inherently harder to track (and thus less valuable as a metric).
Quoting Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
If someone else did this, it would've been called scam.
One of the recent posts:
"A study claiming a tenfold decrease in bugs splattered on evolutionary biologist Anders Møller’s windshield over two decades has been retracted."
On the other hand there are other similar studies that reach similar conclusions, and specifically try to control for aerodynamics e.g. [1] which says
> The weak positive relationship between vehicle registration year and splat rate suggests that newer vehicles are more efficient at sampling insects than older vehicles.
i.e. they saw more insects on newer cars compared to older ones in the same time period.
In general ecology studies aren't like lab physics, you can't control every possible confounding variable; the systems are too complicated and studies ex-situ have their own limitations. But refusing to engage with the data we do have because it's not perfect isn't going to help you make better decisions, and doesn't represent some moral high ground.
[1] https://cdn.buglife.org.uk/2022/05/Bugs-Matter-2021-National...
While the retraction brings into question the anecdotal evidence for the windscreen phenomenon ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon ), there are other studies with other sampling approaches that support the global insect population collapse ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations ).
Although the funniest one was driving through a cloud of moths on the A9 one summer about 30 years ago in my little Nissan, which hoovered up enough of them to choke the air filter and die on the next (fairly long and steep) hill. They were hell to get off the windscreen too.
I wish I could say such behavior was shocking. Everything Springer touches turns to shit.
> The debate over the Copenhagen interpretation remains active today, which explains why Gingras and Khelfaoui find the retractions so troubling: A key scientist’s views on an important controversy have been memory holed.
> Both Scarlata and Gingras are concerned that papers by less prominent scientists have disappeared as well without anyone realizing. At a minimum, Gingras wants Planck’s papers restored. “Whoever did it, I don’t care,” he says, “just put them [back] in the database. Intellectually, it’s not acceptable.”
Thanks, copyright bots.
In many cases, it's value-added, because the bundler may also do some curation and interpretation.
Not sure that's what's happening, here, though...
Scientists decided that other scientists will be ranked by coolness (where they publish). And that this is a strict process. Except when the scientist is a celebrity, such as Benaventiste and his water memory. Too cool to reject.
Hopefully this will change as information gets more and more decentralized.
In other words, publishers want a monopoly on what they publish and take the copy rights away from the actual authors.
Saved you a click.
1. Springer Nature are happily selling an empty PDF for $39.95.
2. Springer Nature responded that they’re not going to tell you why they retracted it, because retraction details are normally only shared with the author (who in this case died almost 80 years ago).
Was it a bot commenting as well? That's a hilariously tone-deaf response. Guess we'd better bust out the ouija board to ask max plank himself.
Counting papers is death. Everything connected with it is death. This is Max fucking Planck, who gave us the photon. We're judging him according to today's "standards." He's "failing."
Ok. So be it. We'll get what we incentivize.
Good luck sharing that information with Max Planck. It's amazing how robotically humans can act sometimes. I suppose this could be an AI or automated response, but it's just as likely it's someone following the letter of the law without using any critical thought.
Bots and automation aren't inherently bad, but often times the motivation is pure cost savings for the company and users pay the price.
A more rational design could have a periodic human auditing process, appeal/reversal process, and a public audit/action log for clarity. However, that's going to eat into the savings of automating the whole thing so why bother
Time for a séance.
Unfortunately, that's nothing new.
lol, getting paid for nothing. Highest levels of capitalism
See (and listen to): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0
> Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
And this is also outrageous. Not only do they censor but they charge people for that. I believe states need to build up a basic scientific work, in particular for older papers. It can not be that private entities control access to information here.
> Scarlata suspects Springer Nature’s internal policing software removed the paper
That's even worse. So an internal tool decides what to censor. Imagine if all access to old articles were controlled by private greedy companies that run auto-tools, AI, to censor stuff. We need to retaliate here in a way to ensure open access to science perpetually.
> Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that“detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”
Max is dead, so this is a cop out. But even aside from this, it is incorrect.
Springer has a responsibility to everyone else here. If they censor something they abused our trust. Such articles should not be held in private hands. The whole idea of taxpayers paying for something and then Springer, Elsevier etc.. siphoning that money by their paywall, is outrageous. Now that they also censor information, it is time to take all their privileges completely away.
Either way the Streisand effect will now kick in. Springer has become famous for trying to cancel Planck. That injustice can not stand, no matter if automatic tools used it or not (which also shows that these tools are buggy - shame on Springer for employing buggy tools leading to vile censorship methods).
it would break quantum physics
completely unsurprised, given the state of online papers publishing. if you don’t have an subscription or aren’t an organisation member, the fees are insane
Things are slowly changing but I can't wait for this parasitic business model to collapse for good.
How about assigning a real copy editor with subject matter expertise? How about publishing open source libraries that automatically validate and output visualizations for their formats? How about hosting multimedia supplements?
It would not be difficult at all to earn the money they charge. There is so much room for creativity and innovation and adding value in scientific publishing.
Why pay money to make a better product when you can pay zero money for a worse product and no change in subscriptions? What are your customers gonna do, go get the paper somewhere else?
They can of course choose short term profits over long term viability, which wouldn't be all that surprising, but that changes the explanation from "more profits" to "short-sightedness/incompetence"
https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/
When we looked at well-run noncommercial journals, like The Physical Review, the cost was justified by exception handling in the peer review process. The average peer review case goes smoothly but if somebody has a complaint and there a lot of appeals and reviews the cost can skyrocket.
Our cost structure was $3-$5 a paper but we struggled to get even that. arXiv was unfunded at Los Alamos and I think Cornell never appreciated the value that it created for the world, had we found a way to capture a few percent of the value we created we would have been "sustainable" but I think that is incompatible with running it on a shoestring the way we did.
I am not enthusiastic about arXiv being independent, I don't have any problem with the high salary they want to pay the director, you are going to pay that for a good non-profit manager in NYC but you could just as easily pay that much for a bad non-profit manager.
I have nightmares though that had arXiv been independent in the 2000s somebody I know might have wound up at Epstein's island not because I think he's evil or perverse but rather because he's naive [1]. arXiv is a gem that would be attractive to somebody like Epstein and would be very possible for somebody like that to have funded it 100% back then. As it is it will be sucked into a somewhat corrupt NGO-industrial complex and end up spending $30-$50 a paper just on fundraising. It's sad.
[1] so many people who got in his circle strike me like children who were playing in the street and got hit by a car, and you'd hope people in those leadership positions should have better judgement
To be clear, I’m not talking about subjective style issues, I mean conforming to their own spec and avoiding careless bugs.
All remaining work fell on the backs of the physics referees. I’m not sure what value Springer provided from an editorial standpoint. It was disappointing to say the least after all that hard work.
The entire publishing process often feels like a chain of "you had ONE job"-type errors from the journals (presumably because they're wildly underpaying and overworking the people whose one job these things should have been).
[*] Nothing usually happens if you push back on this fake deadline, though I suppose your paper might end up in a different issue of a printed journal. It's just annoyingly rushed--give me a week!
Seems like, in 2026, we can have direct publishing without the need of these services? Is it the infra, like query tools and such, that prevent a migration away?
edit: I'm not going to reply to every comment, but thank you all, helps paint the picture a bit better for me!
If you don't care about how science street cred works, nothing stops you from just throwing your papers up on arxiv. But then you get no publishing rep. And no visibility either. A big name journal in a given field gets eyes on your paper by default - but in the pits of arxiv, if you don't put your work out there yourself in the circles, no one will see it.
Then you had promising projects like Plos, but they sold themselves. They turned into a joke: open access and good IF, but high fees for the author, thus becoming a quick way to get a sub-par paper published "for the points" if your lab can pay the fee. Pay to win, using a gaming term. If you know you have a good paper, you publish on any other (closed) journal with similar IF but cheaper.
The authors who put them up there didn't even plan on publishing in a journal. They just throw their work out there - no peer review, no nothing. Post the link on Twitter and maybe someone in the field will see it and find it useful.
This is especially true in fast-moving and highly applied fields like ML - the fields that are less "big science gang" and more "high intensity corporate R&D warzone".
Hosting pdfs + paying out reviewers could be covered by donations.
There are a lot of researchers writing papers. In many fields it isn't possible to read them all, so you need someone to make a selection of what is useful. Get into Nature any "everyone" will read your paper because it is important. However if you fail that you only get into a small niche publication - the only people who will read your paper are people who search it out - likely because they are in that tiny niche (and have personally met you to discuss this niche at a conference). There are even lower grades up publications which nobody reads, but in theory someone could find it in a search.
What physics papers should a chemist read? If you are a physicist you should be reading more papers, but there are still too many to read them all so you need a selection, but that selection should bias to others working on similar problems to you. The same applies for every other field: you can't know everything so you need someone to apply a selection to tell you what is important for you to know.
It's easy for anyone to publish papers online, but it's very difficult for a journal to build credibility and reputation. If you publish in some random journal no one has ever heard of, everyone will assume your paper couldn't get through peer review at a "real" journal.
That's why the established journals exist.
How much longer are scientists going to continue respecting and embracing the useless parasites that are journal publishers, with their right-out-in-the-open, obvious, intentional grifting. You don't need these jackasses.
What you rely on them for technically, the dissemination of papers, could be done with an $80/mo Kubernetes cluster and like three part-time volunteers.
Now in terms of what they provide for the peer-reviewing process... It's not like they pay reviewers. And most of that money is definitely not going to editors. It appears journal brands are only useful as signals of prestige, but with their ethics increasingly circling the drain, I'm not even sure that trust is well-placed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#Plagiari...
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-11964995