The Curious Case of Max Planck retracted papers. When past scientific practices meet contemporary publishing norms

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the retraction of Max Planck's historical papers due to modern digitization practices, highlighting how current publishing norms can distort historical scientific records.

Contribution

It demonstrates that contemporary retraction practices are anachronistic when applied to early 20th-century publications and discusses implications for digital scholarly infrastructure.

Findings

Retractions of Planck's papers resulted from digitization and copyright issues, not fraud.

Historical publication practices differed from modern norms, affecting interpretation.

Digital infrastructures can hinder access to historical scientific works.

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. Ironically, the original papers remain accessible today through the nonprofit digital platform Internet Archive rather than through the publisher that originally issued the journal.