What Happened to Springer Nature Removes Two Studies by Max Planck?

The 'retraction' of two studies by Max Planck, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, by publisher Springer Nature, has sparked considerable debate within the scientific community and among historians of science. The papers in question, philosophical essays titled 'Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt' (1940) and a lecture from 1942, were originally published in the German journal 'Die Naturwissenschaften' (now 'The Science of Nature'). On Springer's digital platform, these articles were marked as 'withdrawn due to copyright violation' or 'article violation,' with their content replaced by blank pages, though the empty PDFs were still offered for sale.

Initial discovery of these 'retractions' by users on platforms like PubPeer in 2023 led to confusion, as Max Planck, who died in 1947, was renowned for his integrity. An investigation by historians of physics, published as an arXiv preprint in May 2026, clarified that the withdrawals did not originate from scientific fraud or errors in Planck's work. Instead, they appear to be a byproduct of Springer's modern digitization and rights-management procedures, likely implemented around 2005 when the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) records for these papers were created.

During Planck's era, it was common and accepted practice for prominent scholars to republish their lectures and essays in multiple venues and formats. The 1942 paper, for instance, was published as a booklet, an article in another journal, and later incorporated into a collection of Planck's works. This practice, while legitimate in the early 20th century, is retrospectively interpreted as 'duplicate publication' or 'self-plagiarism' under contemporary publishing norms, which prioritize unique, proprietary textual objects for bibliometric evaluation and commercialization.

The consequences of this anachronistic application of modern rules are significant. Critics argue that such actions distort the historical record, limit the accessibility of foundational scientific texts, and reflect a problematic trend where commercial publishers' digital infrastructures can arbitrarily alter the past. The original papers remain accessible through non-profit platforms like the Internet Archive, ironically, rather than through the publisher that originally issued the journal.

As of June 2026, the situation remains that the papers are marked as withdrawn on Springer Nature's platform. However, the academic discourse has largely shifted to understanding the 'retraction' as a consequence of evolving publishing ethics and digital archiving practices, rather than a reflection on Max Planck's scientific integrity. The case serves as a prominent example in ongoing discussions about research integrity, the history of scientific communication, and the responsibilities of modern publishers towards historical content.