The Terrifying 2011-Era Case Of Max Planck’s Retracted Papers

Two 1940s papers by physicist Max Planck were recently retracted by Springer Nature with a generic 'copyright violation' notice. Historians Yves Gingras and Mahdi Khelfaoui investigated and found the retractions appear to be the result of an automated system Springer Nature deployed during digitization of legacy journals. The system, unable to properly handle pre-DOI era papers, flagged them incorrectly. Springer Nature has not commented, and the papers remain withdrawn. The incident raises broader concerns about how many lesser-known authors' works may have been silently retracted by the same automated process.