The Curious Case of Max Planck retracted papers. When past scientific practices meet contemporary publishing norms
Abstract
This article examines the case of two papers published in Naturwissenschaften by the physicist Max Planck that were retrospectively marked as "retracted" on Springer digital platform. Rather than originating in scientific fraud, these withdrawals appear to result from contemporary digitization and copyright-management procedures applied anachronistically to historical publications. Through an investigation of the circulation history of Planck 1940 and 1942 philosophical essays, the article shows that republication across multiple formats was a common and legitimate practice within the scientific publishing culture of the early 20th century. Such practices only became problematic with the later transformation of the scientific article into a countable and proprietary unit within systems of bibliometric evaluation and commercial academic publishing. This article argues that contemporary notions such as "duplicate publication" and "self-plagiarism" are historically situated categories that cannot be applied retrospectively without distorting the historical record. More broadly, the Planck case reveals how digital scholarly infrastructures controlled by large commercial publishers can limit the accessibility of the scientific past.
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BibTeX
@misc{gingras2026curious,
title = {{The Curious Case of Max Planck retracted papers. When past scientific practices meet contemporary publishing norms}},
author = {Yves Gingras and Mahdi Khelfaoui},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.17534},
eprint = {2605.17534},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17534},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The Curious Case of Max Planck retracted papers. When past scientific practices meet contemporary publishing norms
AU - Yves Gingras
AU - Mahdi Khelfaoui
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/25
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.17534
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17534
AB - This article examines the case of two papers published in Naturwissenschaften by the physicist Max Planck that were retrospectively marked as "retracted" on Springer digital platform. Rather than originating in scientific fraud, these withdrawals appear to result from contemporary digitization and copyright-management procedures applied anachronistically to historical publications. Through an investigation of the circulation history of Planck 1940 and 1942 philosophical essays, the article shows that republication across multiple formats was a common and legitimate practice within the scientific publishing culture of the early 20th century. Such practices only became problematic with the later transformation of the scientific article into a countable and proprietary unit within systems of bibliometric evaluation and commercial academic publishing. This article argues that contemporary notions such as "duplicate publication" and "self-plagiarism" are historically situated categories that cannot be applied retrospectively without distorting the historical record. More broadly, the Planck case reveals how digital scholarly infrastructures controlled by large commercial publishers can limit the accessibility of the scientific past.
ER -