Why did this journal remove two 1940 papers by Max Planck?

The real issue is whether publishers of scientific journals should also apply today’s standards of plagiarism or plagiarism to older articles. Magazine publishing in the early 20th century was very different. The emphasis was on achieving a wide spread of knowledge across a fragmented scientific community separated by language and geographical distance, published in many different journals. As a result, the boundaries have become increasingly blurred between discussions, conference proceedings, pamphlets, anthologies, newspaper articles and the like.

The business of science has evolved to the point where it is dominated by large commercial publishing groups that are more interested in copyright protection and profit making. Repetition/self-publishing is very difficult now, when publications are important for recruiting and motivating scientists, as well as funding research. Applying these current standards would be difficult for “the digital circulation of historical documents,” the authors concluded.

The journal’s publisher, Springer Nature, killed Scarlata’s editor who planned to end the crisis. Springer Nature also declined to comment on the Science story, only telling Kean through a representative that “details of abstracts are generally confidential and may be shared with the relevant authors.”

Since Planck died in 1947, he can no longer find a direct answer. All of these papers are now in the public domain in many countries, so it’s not like copyright infringement is a problem anymore. It is still possible to access all these papers through the Internet. But as Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in their essay, removing the two papers distorts history. “Whoever did that, I don’t care,” Gingras he told Science. “Just put it (back) in the bin. Wisely, it’s not acceptable.”