alt.hn

6/26/2026 at 2:10:26 PM

Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck

 https://www.science.org/content/article/why-have-papers-one-history-s-most-famous-physicists-been-retracted

by adharmad

6/26/2026 at 2:30:20 PM

> […] the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.”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.

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

by bstsb

6/26/2026 at 2:43:48 PM

Oh even if your org has a subscription, the fees are insane. You just don't see them.

Things are slowly changing but I can't wait for this parasitic business model to collapse for good.

by stncls

6/26/2026 at 2:54:03 PM

What's most bothersome is there is work for them to do.

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.

by jrumbut

6/26/2026 at 3:05:16 PM

That sounds an awful lot like "costs" which seriously compromises the "free profit" model.

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?

by vitally3643

6/26/2026 at 3:12:11 PM

20 years ago, that argument would make sense. They had no competition and could do what they wanted. As an earlier comment stated: that is starting to change, and if they wait until open competitors are fully established, then it will be too late. Now is the time for them to realize that their parasitic business model is coming to an end and they need to change if they want to survive long term.

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"

by MostlyStable

6/26/2026 at 4:00:41 PM

They have no competition on any given paper that they hold the rights to.

by HPsquared

6/26/2026 at 5:02:33 PM

Well, maybe no competition when we're talking about institutional access rights on dry land. However, for everyone else, there's quite a bit of competition out there in the high seas.

by 12_throw_away

6/26/2026 at 7:35:43 PM

That's only for individual usage, which, I assume, is small potatoes compared to institutional usage. No major research institution is going to use piracy as an institutional policy, and neither is it going to boycott Springer, since at least some researchers would put up a fuss—because you don't just need access to lots of papers, sometimes you need access to that specific paper.

by JadeNB

6/27/2026 at 2:54:07 AM

> No major research institution is going to use piracy as an institutional policy

But they could adopt an official policy of all publications being CC licensed and uploaded to at least one of a few officially sanctioned preprint services. That would do a lot to undercut the publishers going forward.

At this point a lot becomes open access after a few years anyway. The issue is historic papers but all of those can be reliably found on the high seas.

by fc417fc802

6/27/2026 at 2:48:36 AM

The time was more than a decade ago. They've consistently chosen to do nothing more than make vague noises about improving.

In addition to the high seas we've got a plethora of preprint services. Between arxiv and bioarxiv alone you can access a decent chunk of the modern literature. What we need at this point is for institutions to require uploading all publications to one of a handful of officially sanctioned preprint services under a CC license and to strictly forbid publishing with any venue that objects to authors disseminating a CC licensed version of the work.

by fc417fc802

6/27/2026 at 9:38:07 AM

It would be nice if billion dollar big tech, in particular those that have R&D donate and form a not-for-profit together with universities that puts this to sleep once and for all. The small irony is that they're paying to submit their own research to another company to make it publicly available.

by DrBazza

6/26/2026 at 5:02:06 PM

Oh they are very aware of the threat. But their weapon of choice is the legal system and regulatory capture, not improving their product.

by thayne

6/26/2026 at 3:47:57 PM

Do you think these papers have the economic position they have because they are better than some competitor? Or because they have copyright: they provide exclusive access to some important things ...

by spwa4

6/26/2026 at 3:38:10 PM

Yes, many students and researchers resort to piracy.

by GTP

6/26/2026 at 4:54:55 PM

The students and researchers weren't the customers, but instead the large institutions they belong to. In a sense, they should be the same from this context, but the amount of consolidation that has occurred in the academic publishing space means that large institutions don't really have the same plausible deniability that their individual members do.

by monocasa

6/27/2026 at 9:39:53 AM

Back in the 90s, my post-doc piracy was photocopying and distribution at every conference, and large mail drops.

by DrBazza

6/26/2026 at 5:24:11 PM

Well, yes. There are several ways to get papers:

https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/

by leephillips

6/26/2026 at 8:32:25 PM

Great resource. Thanks Lee. (Loved your book about Noether, BTW)

by macbend

6/26/2026 at 8:38:44 PM

You’re welcome. I hope it’s useful. And I’m glad you loved my book!

by leephillips

6/26/2026 at 4:44:27 PM

I was involved with arXiv when it first came to Cornell (blame me if you can't get an endorsement!) and we did plenty of analysis about the cost structure of academic publishing.

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

by PaulHoule

6/27/2026 at 2:53:02 AM

Not much to worry about then: Ginsparg* doesn't seem like he would have triggered Ghislaine's matcher, plus these guys don't like to step into the same river twice (out of superstition, mainly)

(delete this conspiracism if PP makes highlights?)

As it is Garry still isn't distancing himself [further] from PLTR (I think), and I wonder if _you'd_ apply to Dialog for a snark?

*Ginsparg comes off as having some of the same curmudgeonly bits of Habermas so they might even fear him long after it doesn't matter anymore

by oliculipolicula

6/27/2026 at 4:43:35 PM

Some people aren't cut out for celebrity. We were sitting around Ginsparg's office talking about how cringe it was that Steve Wolfman had nominated him for a McArthur Genius award.

It was a running gag that Ginsparg would get a speaking invitation and he'd nominate me to go in his stead because I had a reputation of being somebody who could go anywhere and not get in trouble. The library would never pay for my travel though because I didn't have an MLS degree.

I might go to somewhere like Dialog if I got invited and didn't have to pay for a ticket and especially if they paid for my hotel and accommodations, but most of the people who show up at that kind of thing have opinions that are strongly held but rather ordinary and it just as much fun to go to a lower-tier music festival and pass a joint around the firepit. Thiel being involved breaks the deal, like I am still kicking myself for letting myself get tricked into buying a Girard book by one of his minions.

by PaulHoule

6/27/2026 at 12:52:07 AM

[dead]

by karencarits

6/26/2026 at 3:26:06 PM

I published in Nature Physics and the copy-editing process was quite embarrassing, to the point where we had to repeatedly nag them to stop them from making the manuscript presentation worse.

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.

by morelandjs

6/26/2026 at 5:08:48 PM

Right? A lot of journals make a big deal about submitting your manuscript in the proper format (sometimes even LaTeX if you're lucky) and then you get the galley proofs back and half the equations and citations now have typos in them.

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).

by 12_throw_away

6/26/2026 at 6:51:38 PM

On top of that, the whole thing is done in fits and starts. You send in the final revision, it vanishes into the void for some unspecified time, and then they offer[*] you 48 hours--sometimes not even lined up with two working days!--to figure out what they "fixed" and repair it yourself.

[*] 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!

by mattkrause

6/26/2026 at 11:59:15 PM

It could be incompetence, or it could be reviewers and others intentionally trying to sabotage other people's work.

by KennyBlanken

6/27/2026 at 3:25:00 AM

> it could be reviewers and others intentionally trying to sabotage other people's work

Anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge about the topic being discussed would know that everything I described happens after reviewers and editors approve the manuscript. At this stage, they have all long since ended their involvement in the process.

As with most conspiracy theories, this "theory" reveals much about you, but fails to say anything at all about the topic at hand. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzDztyS09CU

by 12_throw_away

6/26/2026 at 2:48:09 PM

The fees to publish in journals for authors/labs are insane too.

by dieselgate

6/26/2026 at 3:12:42 PM

I'm not familiar here, but if both the publishers and readers are unhappy, why do these services still exist? Is it the 'prestige' of being published with some of these guys? Or do you need to be published for xyz reasons?

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!

by dpoloncsak

6/26/2026 at 3:23:04 PM

Publishing is how scientists get their street cred. Thus, the scientists themselves want to publish in big name journals to up their rep - hitting something like Nature is major coup. And then they can convert their standing in the big science gang to things like research grants, commercial projects, academic tenures, etc.

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.

by ACCount37

6/26/2026 at 3:45:20 PM

Arxiv is not p2p, is a preview of what will be published hopefully.

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.

by otherme123

6/26/2026 at 4:16:01 PM

It's "not p2p", it's just used like p2p. A lot of papers on arxiv nowadays are "preprints" that will only ever get "printed" on someone's office laser.

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".

by ACCount37

6/26/2026 at 6:53:15 PM

PLOS Biology and PLOS Computational Biology are pretty well-regarded (the others are outside of my field).

PLOS One does publish pretty much anything, but that was always meant to be the point: "here's some data, make of it what you will. "

by mattkrause

6/26/2026 at 4:47:35 PM

What I dont understand is why cant we get free open journals with high curation standards that would eventually get to the reputation level of Nature.

Hosting pdfs + paying out reviewers could be covered by donations.

by yreg

6/26/2026 at 6:50:49 PM

Donations hasn’t been a successful path for the wider internet, no reason to expect any difference here. Ads embedded in the images, or perhaps listen to a message from our sponsor while we prepare your PDF?

by awjlogan

6/26/2026 at 8:14:29 PM

Donations likely won't work, but a combination of realistic publishing fees that do not enrich a publishing house plus government sponsorship (which would sort of happen implicitly when those fees are paid from grant money) likely would.

by PaulDavisThe1st

6/26/2026 at 10:19:54 PM

Why? What is so costly about running a journal?

by yreg

6/26/2026 at 11:53:10 PM

Even just the basic admin costs associated with paper review - handling that for a medium sized journal is at least one full time job - are going to add up to more than I think donations will ever generate for such a task.

My mental model is a non-print journal, so there are very few "publishing" costs, but the overall administration of things, from the tech side to the typical scientific paper processing workflow, is not a long term task for volunteers (I suspect).

by PaulDavisThe1st

6/27/2026 at 7:19:34 AM

Myriads of organizations doing much more mundane things can attract donations to sustain full time employees.

by yreg

6/26/2026 at 10:19:03 PM

Works pretty well for Wikimedia which has gotten incredibly rich while providing an essential service for the internet public. (Off the back of volunteers, of course.)

by yreg

6/26/2026 at 7:05:45 PM

> paying out reviewers

Reviewers are not usually paid.

by robotresearcher

6/26/2026 at 6:45:52 PM

You're mixing metaphors. Academic prestige is like the complete opposite of "street cred".

by breezybottom

6/26/2026 at 8:56:04 PM

It's also misses the point. People don't want "glam" papers for ego boosts and bragging rights. They want them to keep the current jobs and perhaps get better ones.

Any replacement system needs to somehow serve as a token for people who can't/won't actually read your papers.

by mattkrause

6/26/2026 at 3:45:58 PM

(read the other replies first, I'm going to assume you understand that first!)

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.

by bluGill

6/26/2026 at 3:21:33 PM

A lot of academic reputation, as well as performance evaluation (for example toward tenure) is based on being published in "prestigious" journals. If you could fix that problem, I suspect the parasitic journals would evaporate overnight.

by bruckie

6/26/2026 at 4:14:58 PM

Because the journal is a stamp of approval, and scientists are measured almost exclusively through their publication record. Getting a paper accepted by Nature can make a career.

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.

by DiogenesKynikos

6/26/2026 at 4:56:22 PM

I was going to post that snippet as well.

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.

by xp84

6/26/2026 at 5:43:43 PM

When their jobs don't depend on it. (as in it is evaluated for hiring and promotion) Ofc it differs depending on discipline.

by fl0id

6/26/2026 at 2:58:18 PM

To be fair, the Springer empty PDF paper for $39.95, has zero errors, and zero plagiarism, so it is above the bar of their other paywalled proceedings papers.

by tcp_handshaker

6/26/2026 at 3:27:03 PM

Even emptiness can be plagiarized. See Cage's 4'33"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#Plagiari...

by fhdkweig

6/26/2026 at 3:30:55 PM

That page says that eight years after the supposed lawsuit "Batt admitted that the alleged legal dispute had been a publicity stunt and that he had actually only made a donation of £1,000 to the John Cage Foundation."[1] I guess that he plagiarized it is sure even if the copyright claim was not litigated.

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-11964995

by Noumenon72

6/26/2026 at 3:41:40 PM

4'33 is not empty! That is a common misperception. 4'33 is the sound of the ambient space around the listener. Each performance is unique.

by dotancohen

6/26/2026 at 4:41:54 PM

IMHO they are both arrogant scoundrels for doing this.

by tanseydavid

6/26/2026 at 6:46:43 PM

its always seemed like a prank to me; and I'm impressed that he never broke during the performance to ask "are you people really falling for this???"

by badprose

6/26/2026 at 5:08:36 PM

interesting connection to Cage. Maybe Springer Nature also sees the empty pdf as a form of art? :)

by computerdork

6/26/2026 at 6:57:53 PM

As it introduces the (very) reduced Planck constant, it's obviously worth $39.95 for historical value alone. A bargain at any price!

by CamperBob2

6/26/2026 at 7:15:09 PM

Good thing sci-hub exists…

by jrflo

6/26/2026 at 6:24:19 PM

The greed of scientific publishers is beyond parody at this point, these companies need to be destroyed.

by anigbrowl

6/26/2026 at 6:13:46 PM

While it seems pretty obvious to me that this was an algorithm run amok, I think it's absolutely ghastly that they would retract papers algorithmically without human intervention in the first place.

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.

by hn_throwaway_99

6/26/2026 at 2:28:54 PM

> 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.

The system is broken

by ashenke

6/26/2026 at 4:03:18 PM

I am still suspicious that this has something to do with the relationship between Springer-Verlag and the Max Plank Digital Library (MPDL) which supports open access.

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.

by kurthr

6/26/2026 at 6:22:51 PM

> I am still suspicious that this has something to do with the relationship between Springer-Verlag and the Max Plank Digital Library (MPDL) which supports open access.

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.

by kergonath

6/26/2026 at 10:56:35 PM

Apparently the studies were removed in 2011, it just took 15 years for somebody interested to notice.

by dotancohen

6/26/2026 at 4:49:30 PM

Planck's papers contained multiple em-dashes -- so, clearly he used ChatGPT to write these papers.

He should have known better. </sarc>

by tanseydavid

6/26/2026 at 2:32:56 PM

and, as the articles points out, it is literally out of copyright.

For profit journals need to die.

by Quarrel

6/26/2026 at 3:53:08 PM

You know what is even worse? A lot of what is paid come from public grants and not-for-profit grants. Reviewers are not paid. Editors are mostly other researchers. Authors are required to put the paper in ready-to-process.format. Thus public money funelled into journal pockets.

There is almost zero reasons why the governments or NIH-like institutions don't have their paper repository.

by otherme123

6/26/2026 at 3:54:46 PM 

  > There is almost zero reasons why the governments or NIH-like institutions don't have their paper repository.
Prestige. Though I do agree that prestige is almost zero reason.

by dotancohen

6/26/2026 at 3:16:33 PM

"The purpose of a system is what it does"

it's designed that way.

by kingleopold

6/26/2026 at 4:12:48 PM

Robert Maxwell, Ghislane Maxwell's father, was a big player in turning the industry towards profit seeking (though I agree with the sibling comment that it's capitalism's fault ultimately).

by tehjoker

6/26/2026 at 3:57:28 PM

Downvoting this comment doesn’t make it less true.

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.

by Henchman21

6/26/2026 at 6:15:51 PM

Again, the system is working as intended. Capitalism is a wonderful hack on so many levels.

by genxy

6/26/2026 at 7:46:50 PM

Yes, making life all about money and everything else is meaningless? What a hack!

What a joy to live in such a world!

For those that need it: */S*

by Henchman21

6/26/2026 at 9:29:14 PM

It is a web of self reinforcing feedback structures that even if you know how they operate, it requires too much coordination to control. It is a sticky web, the more you move, the more it binds.

by genxy

6/26/2026 at 8:45:33 PM

I think the downvotes come from the comment not really saying much.

If my use of Tor makes me look suspicious in the eyes of the police is that the purpose of Tor?

by criddell

6/26/2026 at 11:54:00 PM

And I think it comes from bots who attempt to police allowed thoughts on HN. To each their own, I suppose

by Henchman21

6/27/2026 at 12:21:54 AM

Is reading the astralcodexten post among your allowed thoughts? I don't downvote comments, but I think POSIWID is total bollocks. It may mean "some systems are somewhat corrupted by malign influences", in which case phrasing that as POSIWID is an outrageous exaggeration, or it may mean "there are no purposes", which is just untrue, or "your hoped-for purpose is naive", which is made less clear by phrasing it as POSIWID.

by card_zero

6/27/2026 at 1:10:34 AM

You can ask dang specifically or another moderator to prove if you are being trafficked down to irrelevancy by bots. I'm very certain you're wrong either way.

by latency-guy2

6/26/2026 at 4:24:11 PM

The system is fine. The culture is broken. Scientific publishing isn't forced on the community by regulation or necessity. You can publish papers in infinite number of ways online. Unlike something like healthcare or housing, where there are no alternatives, there are plenty of alternatives when it comes to media publishing.

by lxe

6/26/2026 at 5:51:15 PM

There are not if you are working in it. Some grants for example include provisions that you publish in tier so and so journals. If that is the case, there might be one of those that is open-access / independent, but more likely there is not.

by fl0id

6/26/2026 at 6:13:18 PM

What they are saying is that this is nearly a 100% self-own. The department and the academic structure sets the KPIs, like where to publish and how much. This is very much a monkey caught with their hand in a jar moment.

by genxy

6/26/2026 at 6:41:43 PM

'Scientists' and 'administrators of scientific departments' are two groups with minimal overlap.

by anigbrowl

6/26/2026 at 7:28:43 PM

Department heads come from the scientific faculty, normally on a tour-of-duty rotation.

by genxy

6/27/2026 at 10:36:42 AM

Sometimes, sure, but as someone new, you have no power to change it. Department head might, I cannot really say. In addition, I believe funding agencies have the bigger role, and they also have such requirements.

by fl0id

6/26/2026 at 5:21:57 PM

You forgot the "still" in that sentence.

by TheRealPomax

6/26/2026 at 3:45:21 PM

[flagged]

by madmatvey

6/26/2026 at 3:42:39 PM

Do I understand correctly that publishing the same paper in multiple journals is considered self-plagiarism? Who in the name of the great monopoly invented such name for that?

by Artoooooor

6/26/2026 at 4:10:41 PM

The same morons who think that re-using something you have written before in academic work without quoting yourself is (self-)plagiarism for which you should be sanctioned?

(Yes, they are morons because no reasonable person would think this is fair. You need convoluted nonsense arguments to justify this)

by bborud

6/26/2026 at 7:15:43 PM

If I sell a novel to Simon & Shuster, and assign the copyright to them as part of the deal, I can't sell the same novel to HarperCollins under the same terms. I can't sell my movie to Disney AND Sony.

This is the same, but the price is zero. You can take or leave the deal at that price, and you'll probably take it for sufficient academic prestige points ('impact factor', visibility, etc).

By the way, some publishers such as IEEE explicitly allow you to post preprints for free download, eg. at arXiv and on your own web site.

by robotresearcher

6/26/2026 at 7:50:45 PM

Nobody gets royalties for published papers.

by galleywest200

6/26/2026 at 10:53:15 PM

Correct. Hence "the price is zero".

Author still normally transfers copyright to the publisher. That's what gives the publisher the right to distribute copies and charge for them. By default they do not.

by robotresearcher

6/26/2026 at 10:02:48 PM

Publications are the coin of the realm in academia.

by jubilanti

6/26/2026 at 10:02:13 PM

Because if not, people will game the system and submit the same paper to dozens of journals at the same time, and journals are for publishing new, original work. And because in a class, you are being evaluated based on your ability to produce new, original work.

Do you also get angry at a track and field meet, when you show up with a motorbike and get kicked out for violating the rules?

But I don't expect someone who writes that much of an aggressively pompous yet uninformed statement to understand. Chesterton's Fence much?

by jubilanti

6/26/2026 at 10:43:30 PM

This comment is also very aggressive.

by yreg

6/26/2026 at 11:28:05 PM

This is a curious phenomenon that I've started to notice. People often post extremely aggressive comments... but it is still socially acceptable as long as their aggression is directed towards an abstract figure, or a specific person who "isn't in the room".

Whereas if someone replies to that aggressive comment with an equally aggressive comment, that is far less socially acceptable.

Once I noticed it, it's blindingly obvious. It's like going to a dinner party and complaining about your boss being a moron vs calling another guest at the party a moron. But for the longest time, I viewed internet forums as a place where everyone is "equally abstract" - and where the focus is on the exchange of ideas, not your personal relationship with the people behind the ideas. Hence why it took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out this most basic of concepts

by whack

6/26/2026 at 10:58:02 PM

The first paragraph was fine. It would be a valuable viewpoint if the rest were removed.

by dotancohen

6/26/2026 at 4:23:06 PM

It's bad manners and a waste of people's time and attention to present previously published work as novel.

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'.

by MengerSponge

6/26/2026 at 8:21:58 PM

I am flabbergasted. How self-absorbed does one have to be to be offended by someone re-using sections of a paper one has done earlier in a later paper?

No, seriously. If I write 5.000 words on a topic and then re-use 500 words I myself have written earlier without attribution because they are appropriate to the current article, how do you make that «bad manners».

I meant what I said about people who can’t see this without help earlier.

by bborud

6/26/2026 at 9:21:33 PM

I mean, i dont know how things work in academia, but if i was reading a fiction novel, and it turns out half of it was copied from some other novel i already read, i would feel a bit cheated. So i could imagine the same thing applying to academic works.

by bawolff

6/26/2026 at 10:06:59 PM

How about you take that stick out of your ass and stop assuming that norms which have existed for generations are, what, just some kind of mass mental illness?

by jubilanti

6/27/2026 at 12:43:16 PM

You do understand that you look somewhat ridiculous when engaging in the very behavior that the accusation of wooden matter up one’s rectum implies?

You are arguing my point for me by way of self-parody.

by bborud

6/26/2026 at 5:01:54 PM

I think it depends. The popular exposure to this idea, where you can be accused of self-plagiarism for a paper you write for a class, does seem stupid, because obviously your prof hasn't read your paper you wrote in another class and you're not 'wasting' anyone's time.

I can also appreciate that in a "publishing papers as research" context you're completely right.

by xp84

6/26/2026 at 6:59:44 PM

Course credit is not the same as professional certifications. You can apply past expertise/work to as many different certifications as you can manage.

Submitting previously graded work for a new course wastes your own time. It also wastes the professor's time, because they assigned that writing for you to develop a specific skill, and you're trying to not practice whatever they're trying to teach you.

If you have a perfectly matched essay to the assignment, you should talk to the professor about how the assignment can be adapted.

by MengerSponge

6/26/2026 at 10:39:58 PM

I see where you're coming from, and perhaps because I'm absolutely not cut out to be in academia, that's where my bias comes from -- I'm inclined always to view education as a means to an end, and that's certainly far from accurate.

The interesting thing is that in coursework context, plagiarism of any type is merely a massive self-own, since you are (probably) paying money and then purposely cheating yourself of the learning that you paid for. To me, I feel like it needs a different name than plagiarism in the academia or professional world, where you're taking ideas from others and slapping your own name on them for clout or for money. In this case, a real victim exists and you also stand to gain from it if not caught.

by xp84

6/26/2026 at 4:39:29 PM

That makes no sense, either people don't know about the previous work and thus it has clear value. Or they do and they can easily skip it. Beside for a lot of work it be great if you could just literally copy and paste fragments if your previous work to deepen out some reasoning.

by rowanG077

6/26/2026 at 5:03:36 PM

I disagree.

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.

by _the_inflator

6/26/2026 at 4:47:55 PM

Many forums have/had policies about not doing cross posting (in different categories). I find this similar.

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.

by vladms

6/26/2026 at 4:57:07 PM

If they don't know about the previous work, they won't know to go there for more. If they do, it doesn't mean they instantly recognize it and know to skip.

Just mark it, it'll take seconds.

by Dylan16807

6/26/2026 at 4:45:00 PM

plagiarism, with heavy sanctions, of self is of course ridiculous, but having as a standard that you should cite yourself when doing it is not a bad standard. As a reader, it might trigger a "where have I read this before" reaction which is akin to confusion; also having notice that there is another paper on this topic could be quite useful.

by fsckboy

6/26/2026 at 6:34:08 PM

Generally, yes. Journals expect that the research is new. With most research labs (at least in CS) making their work freely available on the internet, the major value of publication is peer review. In my area, double-blind review is the norm, meaning the reviewers and authors don't know who the other is. Thus it's not clear to the reviewers if the prior research is even yours.

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.

by iracigt

6/26/2026 at 4:42:33 PM

Academics base their careers around citation numbers. You need publications and a high H-index to make it anywhere. Self-plagiarism reduces the effectiveness of that metric, which makes it harder to evaluate the actual impact of a researcher.

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."

by StableAlkyne

6/26/2026 at 5:25:52 PM

> In November 1940, philosopher Aloys Müller criticized Planck’s views in a Naturwissenschaften piece titled “Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt” (“Natural Science and the Real External World”). A month later, Planck responded in print—and used the exact same title. This, Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect, caused Springer Nature’s copyright bot to retract the paper as plagiarism decades later, even though the contents of the two essays differ markedly.

> 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.

by Sweepi

6/26/2026 at 2:39:49 PM

Link to site: https://retractionwatch.com

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."

by khurs

6/26/2026 at 3:33:54 PM

What's a "tenfold decrease"?

by NopIdoN

6/26/2026 at 3:40:44 PM

Inverse of a tenfold increase, so 1/10 aka 0.1x previous number?

by dcrazy

6/27/2026 at 11:52:16 AM

a decimation

by instakill

6/26/2026 at 3:40:07 PM

x -> x/10

by LPisGood

6/26/2026 at 4:19:08 PM

“10x less”

by jagged-chisel

6/26/2026 at 2:49:06 PM

Yeah this seems like a fundamentally anecdotal evidence, if bugs are splatting less on his car windshield

by raverbashing

6/26/2026 at 2:55:44 PM

Worse than anecdotal - even if there is real measured data: aerodynamics of windshields will have changed and have an effect and so we still cannot draw conclusions from this. Only if the experiment is more controlled (that is the same car driving on the same roads at the same speeds at the same time) could we draw a conclusion.

by bluGill

6/26/2026 at 3:31:30 PM

We can't draw conclusions from that study because it's been retracted on the basis that data has been faked.

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...

by jgraham

6/26/2026 at 9:57:42 PM

Good, now if we could get a few hundred more, every year, with registered reports, we might be able to conclude something.

How does one even peer review a single datum, published as a paper? I guess in this case, there was actually something to catch, and it still almost made it through.

by dlcarrier

6/26/2026 at 3:36:45 PM

I didn't mean we shouldn't engage with data at all. However there are so many possible confounding factors in this type of measurement that we should "take it with a lot of salt."

by bluGill

6/26/2026 at 9:22:08 PM

In northern states, there's a plenty of that getting on windshields too

by xp84

6/26/2026 at 3:11:31 PM

Same roads doesn't even control. If you lived in a town that e.g. changed the very local environment (say drained one specific swamp), the nearby roads my have less bugs for a very uninteresting reason

by dmoy

6/26/2026 at 3:47:09 PM

That is the interesting reason.

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 ).

by shagie

6/26/2026 at 4:08:22 PM

Even if this is true, we should still reject any falsified study that supports it.

by bluGill

6/26/2026 at 4:06:25 PM

I drive a 30 year old Range Rover and I can confirm that I have just about as many bug splats now as I did driving my equally un-aerodynamic Volvo 20 years ago.

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.

by ErroneousBosh

6/26/2026 at 5:06:05 PM

> 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.

If someone else did this, it would've been called scam.

by 0xAstro

6/26/2026 at 11:30:04 PM

s/If some else did this/If ordinary citizens did this/

Wealthy companies getting away with fraud is unfortunately business as usual.

https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Main_Page

by soraminazuki

6/26/2026 at 5:07:56 PM

Agreed. The simplest explanation, though, is probably that they used a low quality software tool here. Shame on those software developers who have written it in the first place - they also supported censorship here.

by shevy-java

6/26/2026 at 9:16:37 PM

You can't shame the execution, you can shame the order

by burgerone

6/26/2026 at 2:31:10 PM

> Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.

I wish I could say such behavior was shocking. Everything Springer touches turns to shit.

by p_j_w

6/26/2026 at 3:04:52 PM

I always feel that people want one central place to prove their abilities, but when that central place becomes corrupted, it's hard to break away from it. Because the authority of that place feels as if it's tied to your own authority

by jdw64

6/26/2026 at 2:57:44 PM

Why would you need to pay $40 for a PDF of a paper published almost a hundred years ago? What makes the paper not public domain?

by robertlagrant

6/26/2026 at 2:59:21 PM

You don't. It is public domain. You pay that if you want to get it from them. This is the same as I can get a free pdf of "Linear algebra done right" from Sheldon Axler's website but if I want to get it from Springer I pay $50 or whatever it is.

by seanhunter

6/26/2026 at 3:08:52 PM

That is a very confusing state of affairs!

by robertlagrant

6/26/2026 at 3:16:56 PM

Repackaging and selling free data is a very old business model.

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...

by ChrisMarshallNY

6/26/2026 at 3:22:01 PM

You can also buy licenses to use AV1, a royalty-free codec.

by esterna

6/26/2026 at 2:29:15 PM

Well, I can't be mad if I ever get accused if Plank has no chance.

by segmondy

6/26/2026 at 2:57:37 PM

Plank is dead and so cannot defend himself. You are at least alive and have a potential to do something (what or if it will work is an open question).

Plank is very famous. If this happens to you, but 50 years after you die: odds are you are not famous and nobody will notice.

by bluGill

6/26/2026 at 3:27:04 PM

"Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95." LOL, what a world we are building.

by vanattab

6/26/2026 at 4:57:41 PM

> Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered “self-plagiarism” and frowned upon today

In other words, publishers want a monopoly on what they publish and take the copy rights away from the actual authors.

by thayne

6/26/2026 at 7:24:39 PM

Maybe they should stop curating this old content that is no longer under copyright. And maybe Google should make scans of all those old journals available.

by pfdietz

6/26/2026 at 3:00:08 PM

The acronym for the University of Quebec at Montreal is UQàM not UQ :P

by jszymborski

6/26/2026 at 3:45:03 PM

One researcher was at UQAM, the other was at UQTR. Are both not considered part of UQ?

by dcrazy

6/26/2026 at 4:33:25 PM

No, both are separate universities, although some universities also have satelite campuses (UDeM (montreal) has multiple).

Edit0: Although UQ is a group of 10 universities that are public, they are not a single entity.

by dmbche

6/26/2026 at 5:34:09 PM

That sounds like the UC or SUNY systems. UCSB, UCLA, etc are all separate institutions with separate missions, but it’s totally normal to say “UC Berkeley” or “UC Santa Cruz.”

by dcrazy

6/26/2026 at 4:24:33 PM

The "à" between Québec and Montréal should have "accent grave", not "accent aigu".

by adrian_b

6/26/2026 at 4:44:23 PM

As a Montréaler I am ashamed, fixed it.

by jszymborski

6/26/2026 at 8:21:31 PM

I'm beginning to think letting one company control access to the vast majority of scientific knowledge may not be a good thing.

by bigbuppo

6/26/2026 at 3:31:08 PM

> 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.”

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.

by mijoharas

6/26/2026 at 4:01:41 PM

I'm sorry, communicating with ghosts is against Springer Nature policy. This isn't a disreputable publication like Séance Monthly!

by the_af

6/26/2026 at 3:15:53 PM

lol "self plagiarism". Max Planck got an "extra publication."

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.

by nyeah

6/26/2026 at 2:55:55 PM

> detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.

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.

by boscillator

6/26/2026 at 3:30:47 PM

I think this is a good example of Kafkaesque.

by fhdkweig

6/26/2026 at 5:22:01 PM

I really wish they would have asked the representative to confirm that they can only share detailed information with the skeletal remains of an author who died 78 years ago. Not that I think it would make any difference, but it would force the representative to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation.

by poizan42

6/26/2026 at 2:33:05 PM

Max Planck published the same paper in multiple journals in the 1940s, which was common practice at the time. He also published a second unrelated paper that happened to have the same title as the paper it was a response to. In 2011 both papers were retracted from their journals' archives, most likely because a bot incorrectly flagged them for plagiarism.

Saved you a click.

by arrowsmith

6/26/2026 at 4:37:47 PM

You missed the two absurdities:

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).

by chrismorgan

6/26/2026 at 3:55:47 PM

An algorithm did it? Or was the author of apparent sloppily-written machine instructions the actor?

by linkregister

6/26/2026 at 4:55:12 PM

the Germans have a word for that: "vertrottelt" (in English it is just translated as "stupid", but it conveys much more meaning than stupid)

by wolfi1

6/26/2026 at 2:32:07 PM

> “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”

Time for a séance.

by zephen

6/26/2026 at 5:42:35 PM

This is what invariably happens when you give bots control of important day-to-day business operations: The bot makes some horrendous mistake and then there's no human being around who has the authority, the access, and the knowledge to both revert the bot's decision and make sure that the bot doesn't just replay the error at a later date.

by dreamcompiler

6/26/2026 at 6:15:27 PM

Privatizing gains, socializing loses

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

by nijave

6/26/2026 at 6:46:04 PM

Journals are scams, sustained by scientists. All this paid by our taxes.

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.

by BrandoElFollito

6/26/2026 at 4:16:59 PM

So, greed that devoured scientific publication, that's why.

Unfortunately, that's nothing new.

by psychoslave

6/26/2026 at 2:26:07 PM

The world has gone mad.

by josefritzishere

6/26/2026 at 2:33:10 PM

Has it ever been sane?

by baxtr

6/26/2026 at 3:17:12 PM

The world is "sane" when the lucid are treated as beacons and the fools are treated as the unfortunate that must stay away from the engines. Insane when the fools are empowered and the bright have to flee for shelter.

by mdp2021

6/26/2026 at 9:09:37 PM

wait, springer as in axel? the guy who was in the nazi party?

by thescriptkiddie

6/26/2026 at 2:28:26 PM

Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95

lol, getting paid for nothing. Highest levels of capitalism

by akudha

6/26/2026 at 3:24:32 PM

Of course, what they charge $39.95 for is in the public domain. So it's a sort of double scam.

by esterna

6/26/2026 at 5:07:15 PM

Gingras is correct - Springer here tries to censor. I believe the only way to respond to this is by removing Springer completely. Science can not survive when private companies such as Springer begin to censor science, in particular old science.

> 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).

by shevy-java

6/26/2026 at 6:17:57 PM

I don't know much about academia but it seems journals should be cooperatively edited and managed by universities rather than fully privitized. Ideally with an off ramp into public archives after a period of time.

by nijave

6/26/2026 at 3:43:26 PM

[dead]

by xorgun

6/26/2026 at 8:20:36 PM

[dead]

by janerosas

6/26/2026 at 4:56:34 PM

Well I didn't see any counter evidence by Planck so Springer Nature must be right. Otherwise he should defend himself! \s

by BadBadJellyBean

6/26/2026 at 3:04:45 PM

[dead]

by Lapsa

6/26/2026 at 6:28:11 PM

Article was probably flagged as AI written /s

by alansaber

6/26/2026 at 2:48:09 PM

To me, this seems like Science dunking on Nature (the journals). It’s interesting, but only a story because Nature is involved.

by mbreese

6/26/2026 at 3:56:56 PM

I wrote a whole chapter about Max Planck and his challenges and his legacy in my book "What is light? Wave theory of light and origins of ether in science" check it out if you are interested

by majidfekri

6/26/2026 at 4:35:22 PM

I (and I'm sure others) would be interested in your thoughts on Planck and publishing. Otherwise, the comment is just an advertisement.

by mmooss

6/26/2026 at 4:51:27 PM

Everything is an advertisement and nothing is just an advertisement.

by majidfekri