Kenneth Glad
Two papers withdrawn years ago have become the center of a dispute over digital scholarly records. The case shows how older research can be obscured when archival systems apply present-day rules to a different publishing era.
Retractions carry a heavy meaning in research. They often point to flawed data, ethical breaches or serious publishing problems. In the case of Max Planck, the German physicist who became a Nobel laureate in physics in 1918, historians say that signal may be misleading.
According to Science, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec at Montreal, came across Planck’s name on a Retraction Watch list of Nobel Prize winners whose papers had been withdrawn. The entry showed that two Planck papers had been retracted in 2011.
Gingras and Mahdi Khelfaoui, a historian of science at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières, later argued in an arXiv preprint that the removals reflect a clash between copyright enforcement and historical publishing habits.
One withdrawn paper had appeared in more than one place. In current publishing, that can be treated as duplicate publication or a copyright violation. But Gingras and Khelfaoui wrote that earlier scholars often republished work so it could reach separate audiences across a far less connected scientific world.
Khelfaoui told Science: “Science was more fragmented” then. “You wanted different audiences … to have access to your work.”
The page was left blank
The concern grew because the withdrawn paper was not left online with a standard retraction label. According to Science, the page for the old Naturwissenschaften article instead displayed a near-empty notice, making the text itself unavailable.
For researchers, that is more than a formatting choice. When a retracted paper remains visible, readers can still examine it, understand the reason for caution and place it within the wider debate. When the article disappears, part of the scholarly trail becomes harder to follow.
Suzanne Scarlata, editor-in-chief of The Science of Nature, the current name of Naturwissenschaften, told Science she had not known about the removals. “That’s crazy,” she said, “I don’t understand why they were flagged.”
Scarlata suggested automated screening may have been involved. “I think it just happened with their algorithm. It’s a mistake they should probably rectify.”
Science reported that Springer Nature, which owns the journal, declined to comment in detail, citing confidentiality around specific retractions.
A matching title raised questions
The second case looked even harder to explain. Gingras and Khelfaoui wrote in their arXiv preprint that they found no earlier duplicate of that Planck paper, making the stated copyright issue more difficult to understand.
Their suspicion centers on its title. Planck had used the same title for a response to philosopher Aloys Müller, although the contents differed. To the historians, that raised the possibility that a system may have treated the matching titles as evidence of duplication, even when the articles themselves were not the same.
The point matters because the paper belonged to a larger debate over quantum mechanics and the nature of reality. Removing it from easy access does not only affect one citation. It can also make a historical exchange appear thinner, less complete or harder to reconstruct.
The episode worries them because Planck is famous enough for missing papers to attract attention. Work by lesser-known scholars could disappear from databases with far fewer people noticing, leaving gaps that may never be questioned.
Sources: Science, Retraction Watch, arXiv
