Naturwissenschaften retracts two 1940s papers by Max Planck due to copyright algorithm error

Historians Yves Gingras and Mahdi Khelfaoui stumbled upon a bizarre retraction: two papers by Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, had been removed from the journal Naturwissenschaften (now The Science of Nature). The papers—“Meaning and Limits of Exact Science” (1942) and “Natural Science and the Real External World” (1940)—were flagged as copyright violations. Yet Planck’s work had never faced scandal. The pair traced the issue to automated copyright tools that treated historical reprints (common in the 1940s for wider dissemination) as duplicate publications. For instance, the 1942 paper had also appeared as a booklet and in an anthology. The retractions left only blank PDFs, still sold for $39.95 by Springer Nature.

The journal’s current editor-in-chief, Suzanne Scarlata, was unaware of the retractions and called it a “mistake” from an algorithm. The historians argue this highlights a dangerous trend: applying modern self-plagiarism rules to pre-digital publishing norms. They urge publishers to manually review historical archives instead of relying on automated checks. The incident raises broader questions about how scientific institutions handle legacy content and whether algorithmic enforcement can override context-sensitive historical scholarship.