Springer Nature removed two Max Planck papers — and a bot may be to blame

Science reported on 26 June 2026 that Springer Nature quietly retracted two papers by Max Planck, the physicist who founded quantum theory and won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics. Both papers appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, the German journal now called The Science of Nature, and both were removed in 2011.

What was taken away

One of the pieces is a 1942 philosophical essay, "Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft" ("Meaning and Limits of Exact Science"), about how certainty in scientific knowledge can be achieved. It had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books — a common practice at the time for reaching more readers, though it would count as self-plagiarism under today's rules. The retraction notices alleged copyright violations.

The journal normally stamps a RETRACTED notice on a digital paper while leaving the text readable. Here the papers were deleted outright: the links lead to a blank page and empty PDFs with a brief note saying the articles had been "withdrawn due to article violation".

The historians who spotted it

Yves Gingras and Mahdi Khelfaoui of the University of Quebec in Montreal came across the case while looking at a list of Nobel laureates whose papers had been retracted. Shocked to find Planck's name there, they investigated and posted a preprint on arXiv last month. They call the "anachronistic" application of modern standards to a 1942 paper a distortion of the historical record, and note that copyright concerns are moot anyway: Planck died in 1947.

Gingras was especially incensed that the publisher departed from the usual practice of marking a paper retracted rather than erasing it. The second retracted paper, published in 1940, puzzled them even more: it also cited copyright violation, yet that piece had never appeared anywhere else.

A title, a bot, and an editor's verdict

Khelfaoui found a likely explanation. From the 1920s, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg promoted the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Planck opposed it, arguing that an external reality exists beyond human measurements. In 1940 another scientist published a critique of Planck's views, and a few months later Planck replied in the same journal under the identical title. Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect that duplication tripped a copyright or duplicate-detection system decades later, even though the two essays differ markedly.

Suzanne Scarlata, editor-in-chief of The Science of Nature, told Science she had not known about the retractions before being contacted: "That's crazy," she said. "I don't understand why they were flagged. I think it just happened with their algorithm. It's a mistake they should probably rectify." Springer Nature declined to comment, saying details of specific retractions are usually confidential, and blocked an editorial Scarlata had planned on the subject. For the historians, the sting is that the debate over the Copenhagen interpretation is still live — while the views of one of its most prominent critics had been quietly memory-holed.