A publisher retracted two Max Planck papers — then kept selling the blank PDF for $39.95
Springer Nature pulled two papers by the man who gave us the quantum, replaced them with a white page reading “withdrawn due to article violation,” and left the $39.95 download button live. The likely trigger: a plagiarism bot, eight decades too late.
The retracted works date to the 1940s, when republishing a paper across journals was ordinary practice. One “duplicate” simply shared a title with the paper it was answering. A bot most likely flagged both, and a human approved it.
The detail the thread couldn't get over: the publisher won't explain, saying retraction details “can only be shared with the relevant authors.” Planck died in 1947.
The quantum's discoverer, flagged for self-plagiarism
The Science news report sits behind a paywall, but a reader compressed the timeline cleanly: Max Planck published the same paper in multiple journals in the 1940s, which was common at the time; he also published a second, unrelated paper that happened to share a title with the work it responded to. “In 2011 both papers were retracted from their journals' archives, most likely because a bot incorrectly flagged them for plagiarism.”
What turned a footnote into a front-page thread was Springer Nature's execution. Rather than the usual practice of stamping “RETRACTED” while leaving the text readable, readers noted the publisher “posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, 'This article has been withdrawn due to article violation' — [and] is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.” A paper from nearly a century ago, behind a paywall, retracted, and still monetized as a blank page.
A robotic answer about a man who died in 1947
The institutional response read like a category error. The publisher declined to comment beyond saying that retraction details “can only be shared with the relevant authors.” A C++ and aerospace engineer caught the absurdity: “Good luck sharing that information with Max Planck. It's amazing how robotically humans can act sometimes.”
The metric itself was the target. One reader refused the framing entirely:
“This is Max f—ing Planck, who gave us the photon. We're judging him according to today's 'standards.' … We'll get what we incentivize.”
A story only because of whose name is on it
The sharpest meta-read came from a longtime commenter: this is “Science dunking on Nature — it's interesting, but only a story because Nature is involved.” Strip the famous name and it's a routine archival bot error. Keep it, and you get the perfect emblem of academic publishing in 2026: an algorithm convicts a dead Nobel laureate of plagiarizing himself, a human rubber-stamps it, and the cash register stays open on a page with nothing on it.
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