> […] the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
completely unsurprised, given the state of online papers publishing. if you don’t have an subscription or aren’t an organisation member, the fees are insane
What's most bothersome is there is work for them to do.
How about assigning a real copy editor with subject matter expertise? How about publishing open source libraries that automatically validate and output visualizations for their formats? How about hosting multimedia supplements?
It would not be difficult at all to earn the money they charge. There is so much room for creativity and innovation and adding value in scientific publishing.
That sounds an awful lot like "costs" which seriously compromises the "free profit" model.
Why pay money to make a better product when you can pay zero money for a worse product and no change in subscriptions? What are your customers gonna do, go get the paper somewhere else?
20 years ago, that argument would make sense. They had no competition and could do what they wanted. As an earlier comment stated: that is starting to change, and if they wait until open competitors are fully established, then it will be too late. Now is the time for them to realize that their parasitic business model is coming to an end and they need to change if they want to survive long term.
They can of course choose short term profits over long term viability, which wouldn't be all that surprising, but that changes the explanation from "more profits" to "short-sightedness/incompetence"
Well, maybe no competition when we're talking about institutional access rights on dry land. However, for everyone else, there's quite a bit of competition out there in the high seas.
Do you think these papers have the economic position they have because they are better than some competitor? Or because they have copyright: they provide exclusive access to some important things ...
The students and researchers weren't the customers, but instead the large institutions they belong to. In a sense, they should be the same from this context, but the amount of consolidation that has occurred in the academic publishing space means that large institutions don't really have the same plausible deniability that their individual members do.
I was involved with arXiv when it first came to Cornell (blame me if you can't get an endorsement!) and we did plenty of analysis about the cost structure of academic publishing.
When we looked at well-run noncommercial journals, like The Physical Review, the cost was justified by exception handling in the peer review process. The average peer review case goes smoothly but if somebody has a complaint and there a lot of appeals and reviews the cost can skyrocket.
Our cost structure was $3-$5 a paper but we struggled to get even that. arXiv was unfunded at Los Alamos and I think Cornell never appreciated the value that it created for the world, had we found a way to capture a few percent of the value we created we would have been "sustainable" but I think that is incompatible with running it on a shoestring the way we did.
I am not enthusiastic about arXiv being independent, I don't have any problem with the high salary they want to pay the director, you are going to pay that for a good non-profit manager in NYC but you could just as easily pay that much for a bad non-profit manager.
I have nightmares though that had arXiv been independent in the 2000s somebody I know might have wound up at Epstein's island not because I think he's evil or perverse but rather because he's naive [1]. arXiv is a gem that would be attractive to somebody like Epstein and would be very possible for somebody like that to have funded it 100% back then. As it is it will be sucked into a somewhat corrupt NGO-industrial complex and end up spending $30-$50 a paper just on fundraising. It's sad.
[1] so many people who got in his circle strike me like children who were playing in the street and got hit by a car, and you'd hope people in those leadership positions should have better judgement
I published in Nature Physics and the copy-editing process was quite embarrassing, to the point where we had to repeatedly nag them to stop them from making the manuscript presentation worse.
To be clear, I’m not talking about subjective style issues, I mean conforming to their own spec and avoiding careless bugs.
All remaining work fell on the backs of the physics referees. I’m not sure what value Springer provided from an editorial standpoint. It was disappointing to say the least after all that hard work.
Right? A lot of journals make a big deal about submitting your manuscript in the proper format (sometimes even LaTeX if you're lucky) and then you get the galley proofs back and half the equations and citations now have typos in them.
The entire publishing process often feels like a chain of "you had ONE job"-type errors from the journals (presumably because they're wildly underpaying and overworking the people whose one job these things should have been).
I'm not familiar here, but if both the publishers and readers are unhappy, why do these services still exist? Is it the 'prestige' of being published with some of these guys? Or do you need to be published for xyz reasons?
Seems like, in 2026, we can have direct publishing without the need of these services? Is it the infra, like query tools and such, that prevent a migration away?
edit: I'm not going to reply to every comment, but thank you all, helps paint the picture a bit better for me!
Publishing is how scientists get their street cred. Thus, the scientists themselves want to publish in big name journals to up their rep - hitting something like Nature is major coup. And then they can convert their standing in the big science gang to things like research grants, commercial projects, academic tenures, etc.
If you don't care about how science street cred works, nothing stops you from just throwing your papers up on arxiv. But then you get no publishing rep. And no visibility either. A big name journal in a given field gets eyes on your paper by default - but in the pits of arxiv, if you don't put your work out there yourself in the circles, no one will see it.
Arxiv is not p2p, is a preview of what will be published hopefully.
Then you had promising projects like Plos, but they sold themselves. They turned into a joke: open access and good IF, but high fees for the author, thus becoming a quick way to get a sub-par paper published "for the points" if your lab can pay the fee. Pay to win, using a gaming term. If you know you have a good paper, you publish on any other (closed) journal with similar IF but cheaper.
It's "not p2p", it's just used like p2p. A lot of papers on arxiv nowadays are "preprints" that will only ever get "printed" on someone's office laser.
The authors who put them up there didn't even plan on publishing in a journal. They just throw their work out there - no peer review, no nothing. Post the link on Twitter and maybe someone in the field will see it and find it useful.
This is especially true in fast-moving and highly applied fields like ML - the fields that are less "big science gang" and more "high intensity corporate R&D warzone".
(read the other replies first, I'm going to assume you understand that first!)
There are a lot of researchers writing papers. In many fields it isn't possible to read them all, so you need someone to make a selection of what is useful. Get into Nature any "everyone" will read your paper because it is important. However if you fail that you only get into a small niche publication - the only people who will read your paper are people who search it out - likely because they are in that tiny niche (and have personally met you to discuss this niche at a conference). There are even lower grades up publications which nobody reads, but in theory someone could find it in a search.
What physics papers should a chemist read? If you are a physicist you should be reading more papers, but there are still too many to read them all so you need a selection, but that selection should bias to others working on similar problems to you. The same applies for every other field: you can't know everything so you need someone to apply a selection to tell you what is important for you to know.
A lot of academic reputation, as well as performance evaluation (for example toward tenure) is based on being published in "prestigious" journals. If you could fix that problem, I suspect the parasitic journals would evaporate overnight.
Because the journal is a stamp of approval, and scientists are measured almost exclusively through their publication record. Getting a paper accepted by Nature can make a career.
It's easy for anyone to publish papers online, but it's very difficult for a journal to build credibility and reputation. If you publish in some random journal no one has ever heard of, everyone will assume your paper couldn't get through peer review at a "real" journal.
How much longer are scientists going to continue respecting and embracing the useless parasites that are journal publishers, with their right-out-in-the-open, obvious, intentional grifting. You don't need these jackasses.
What you rely on them for technically, the dissemination of papers, could be done with an $80/mo Kubernetes cluster and like three part-time volunteers.
Now in terms of what they provide for the peer-reviewing process... It's not like they pay reviewers. And most of that money is definitely not going to editors. It appears journal brands are only useful as signals of prestige, but with their ethics increasingly circling the drain, I'm not even sure that trust is well-placed.
To be fair, the Springer empty PDF paper for $39.95, has zero errors, and zero plagiarism, so it is above the bar of their other paywalled proceedings papers.
That page says that eight years after the supposed lawsuit "Batt admitted that the alleged legal dispute had been a publicity stunt and that he had actually only made a donation of £1,000 to the John Cage Foundation."[1] I guess that he plagiarized it is sure even if the copyright claim was not litigated.
While it seems pretty obvious to me that this was an algorithm run amok, I think it's absolutely ghastly that they would retract papers algorithmically without human intervention in the first place.
Retraction is a major deal, and would/could do significant harm to an author (obviously in this particular case I think Max's reputation will be fine). The article states:
> Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”
but I'm pretty sure they didn't contact Max Planck, nor his estate, before retracting the articles. I would be absolutely incensed if I were a living author and had one of my papers retracted without the chance to defend myself.
I think this article encapsulates an ever growing frustration that is only exploding with the rise of AI - we're turning more and more decisions over to black boxes that have no accountability and no easy path for rectification when things go wrong.
> Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
I am still suspicious that this has something to do with the relationship between Springer-Verlag and the Max Plank Digital Library (MPDL) which supports open access.
In 2014 MPDL purchase 110k out-of-print and historically significant titles.
In 2015 Springer acquired open-access journals from Max Plank Society.
In 2022 There was an open-access book deal allowing Plank Institute members to more easily publish books.
Things were more not always so intertwined and in 2007 the Society canceled a licensing agreement with Springer due to subscription prices and usage restrictions.
> I am still suspicious that this has something to do with the relationship between Springer-Verlag and the Max Plank Digital Library (MPDL) which supports open access.
Why? Max Plank (the dead Physicist) has nothing to do with whatever the Institute is doing these days. Or the library. Or anything that was named after him.
You know what is even worse? A lot of what is paid come from public grants and not-for-profit grants. Reviewers are not paid. Editors are mostly other researchers. Authors are required to put the paper in ready-to-process.format. Thus public money funelled into journal pockets.
There is almost zero reasons why the governments or NIH-like institutions don't have their paper repository.
The system is fine. The culture is broken. Scientific publishing isn't forced on the community by regulation or necessity. You can publish papers in infinite number of ways online. Unlike something like healthcare or housing, where there are no alternatives, there are plenty of alternatives when it comes to media publishing.
There are not if you are working in it. Some grants for example include provisions that you publish in tier so and so journals. If that is the case, there might be one of those that is open-access / independent, but more likely there is not.
What they are saying is that this is nearly a 100% self-own. The department and the academic structure sets the KPIs, like where to publish and how much. This is very much a monkey caught with their hand in a jar moment.
Robert Maxwell, Ghislane Maxwell's father, was a big player in turning the industry towards profit seeking (though I agree with the sibling comment that it's capitalism's fault ultimately).
Downvoting this comment doesn’t make it less true.
Most everyone and everything has been captured by the ultimate cynicism of Capitalism: if I don’t do it someone else will, so might as well put the money in my pocket right??
I agree with @kingleopod — this system is designed to do what it is doing: keep knowledge private and keep profits high. Full stop.
Do I understand correctly that publishing the same paper in multiple journals is considered self-plagiarism? Who in the name of the great monopoly invented such name for that?
Generally, yes. Journals expect that the research is new. With most research labs (at least in CS) making their work freely available on the internet, the major value of publication is peer review. In my area, double-blind review is the norm, meaning the reviewers and authors don't know who the other is. Thus it's not clear to the reviewers if the prior research is even yours.
The expectation is you cite the previous work to clearly indicate it is not new, and that your submission for review is mostly about new research. In some situations overlap is okay, e.g. there's a conference version and then a journal version with additional results. In that case you disclose in writing what the delta is to the editor (who knows your identity while the reviewers do not). This also means in the paper you have to treat the prior work as if it is by a different group to maintain double-blind review.
The point is to make it clear what is new research. Trying to get credit for the same research multiple times, and boost citation count, is dishonest to the expectations of the community. It's also a waste of time for reviewers (who volunteer) to review same research over and over again after deciding it's acceptable. Think of it like a OSS maintainer getting pull requests for trivial changes to the code just to boost the green squares on someone's GitHub profile. It's a drain on everyone else and doesn't benefit the project.
The same morons who think that re-using something you have written before in academic work without quoting yourself is (self-)plagiarism for which you should be sanctioned?
(Yes, they are morons because no reasonable person would think this is fair. You need convoluted nonsense arguments to justify this)
It's bad manners and a waste of people's time and attention to present previously published work as novel.
Repeating a phrase or two in a document's introduction isn't going to raise flags from any serious people, but copying data, analysis, or large swaths of text? That's a paddlin'.
I think it depends. The popular exposure to this idea, where you can be accused of self-plagiarism for a paper you write for a class, does seem stupid, because obviously your prof hasn't read your paper you wrote in another class and you're not 'wasting' anyone's time.
I can also appreciate that in a "publishing papers as research" context you're completely right.
That makes no sense, either people don't know about the previous work and thus it has clear value. Or they do and they can easily skip it. Beside for a lot of work it be great if you could just literally copy and paste fragments if your previous work to deepen out some reasoning.
I think you are contradicting yourself. If a previous work has been copy and pasted, and a novel reader doesn't know, wouldn't the reader benefit from the option to actually read the previous work as a whole?
All credible authors I read mentioned quotes from earlier works. In fact, that is on the one hand an ego boost as a prolific writer, and also helps sell more copies in case of being purchasable.
Most credible university profs in Germany from the 1990th for example always referenced their former work and mention changes of the context, or in case of a theory, modifications.
Books for example, are reprinted and it has been mentioned whether changes to the content has been done.
Personally I really see no problem, leaving the decision, whether you copied something or not, to the reader.
Many forums have/had policies about not doing cross posting (in different categories). I find this similar.
Yes, maybe from the "plagiarism" angle is not very relevant, but I would prefer not to have a system in which people try to "flood" repositories (journals, etc) with the same thing over and over. People looking for new information, people reviewing will get most of the burden to "keep things clean" while for the poster that is not a problem.
If they don't know about the previous work, they won't know to go there for more. If they do, it doesn't mean they instantly recognize it and know to skip.
plagiarism, with heavy sanctions, of self is of course ridiculous, but having as a standard that you should cite yourself when doing it is not a bad standard. As a reader, it might trigger a "where have I read this before" reaction which is akin to confusion; also having notice that there is another paper on this topic could be quite useful.
Academics base their careers around citation numbers. You need publications and a high H-index to make it anywhere. Self-plagiarism reduces the effectiveness of that metric, which makes it harder to evaluate the actual impact of a researcher.
It should be no surprise that republishing in multiple journals was accepted in the pre-computer era, where citations were inherently harder to track (and thus less valuable as a metric).
Quoting Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
> Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
If someone else did this, it would've been called scam.
Agreed. The simplest explanation, though, is probably that they used a low quality software tool here. Shame on those software developers who have written it in the first place - they also supported censorship here.
Worse than anecdotal - even if there is real measured data: aerodynamics of windshields will have changed and have an effect and so we still cannot draw conclusions from this. Only if the experiment is more controlled (that is the same car driving on the same roads at the same speeds at the same time) could we draw a conclusion.
We can't draw conclusions from that study because it's been retracted on the basis that data has been faked.
On the other hand there are other similar studies that reach similar conclusions, and specifically try to control for aerodynamics e.g. [1] which says
> The weak positive relationship between vehicle registration year and splat rate suggests that newer vehicles are more efficient at sampling insects than older vehicles.
i.e. they saw more insects on newer cars compared to older ones in the same time period.
In general ecology studies aren't like lab physics, you can't control every possible confounding variable; the systems are too complicated and studies ex-situ have their own limitations. But refusing to engage with the data we do have because it's not perfect isn't going to help you make better decisions, and doesn't represent some moral high ground.
I didn't mean we shouldn't engage with data at all. However there are so many possible confounding factors in this type of measurement that we should "take it with a lot of salt."
Same roads doesn't even control. If you lived in a town that e.g. changed the very local environment (say drained one specific swamp), the nearby roads my have less bugs for a very uninteresting reason
I drive a 30 year old Range Rover and I can confirm that I have just about as many bug splats now as I did driving my equally un-aerodynamic Volvo 20 years ago.
Although the funniest one was driving through a cloud of moths on the A9 one summer about 30 years ago in my little Nissan, which hoovered up enough of them to choke the air filter and die on the next (fairly long and steep) hill. They were hell to get off the windscreen too.
I always feel that people want one central place to prove their abilities, but when that central place becomes corrupted, it's hard to break away from it. Because the authority of that place feels as if it's tied to your own authority
> In November 1940, philosopher Aloys Müller criticized Planck’s views in a Naturwissenschaften piece titled “Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt” (“Natural Science and the Real External World”). A month later, Planck responded in print—and used the exact same title. This, Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect, caused Springer Nature’s copyright bot to retract the paper as plagiarism decades later, even though the contents of the two essays differ markedly.
> The debate over the Copenhagen interpretation remains active today, which explains why Gingras and Khelfaoui find the retractions so troubling: A key scientist’s views on an important controversy have been memory holed.
> Both Scarlata and Gingras are concerned that papers by less prominent scientists have disappeared as well without anyone realizing. At a minimum, Gingras wants Planck’s papers restored. “Whoever did it, I don’t care,” he says, “just put them [back] in the database. Intellectually, it’s not acceptable.”
You don't. It is public domain. You pay that if you want to get it from them. This is the same as I can get a free pdf of "Linear algebra done right" from Sheldon Axler's website but if I want to get it from Springer I pay $50 or whatever it is.
> Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”
Was it a bot commenting as well? That's a hilariously tone-deaf response. Guess we'd better bust out the ouija board to ask max plank himself.
That sounds like the UC or SUNY systems. UCSB, UCLA, etc are all separate institutions with separate missions, but it’s totally normal to say “UC Berkeley” or “UC Santa Cruz.”
lol "self plagiarism". Max Planck got an "extra publication."
Counting papers is death. Everything connected with it is death. This is Max fucking Planck, who gave us the photon. We're judging him according to today's "standards." He's "failing."
Max Planck published the same paper in multiple journals in the 1940s, which was common practice at the time. He also published a second unrelated paper that happened to have the same title as the paper it was a response to. In 2011 both papers were retracted from their journals' archives, most likely because a bot incorrectly flagged them for plagiarism.
1. Springer Nature are happily selling an empty PDF for $39.95.
2. Springer Nature responded that they’re not going to tell you why they retracted it, because retraction details are normally only shared with the author (who in this case died almost 80 years ago).
> detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.
Good luck sharing that information with Max Planck. It's amazing how robotically humans can act sometimes. I suppose this could be an AI or automated response, but it's just as likely it's someone following the letter of the law without using any critical thought.
I really wish they would have asked the representative to confirm that they can only share detailed information with the skeletal remains of an author who died 78 years ago. Not that I think it would make any difference, but it would force the representative to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation.
This is what invariably happens when you give bots control of important day-to-day business operations: The bot makes some horrendous mistake and then there's no human being around who has the authority, the access, and the knowledge to both revert the bot's decision and make sure that the bot doesn't just replay the error at a later date.
Bots and automation aren't inherently bad, but often times the motivation is pure cost savings for the company and users pay the price.
A more rational design could have a periodic human auditing process, appeal/reversal process, and a public audit/action log for clarity. However, that's going to eat into the savings of automating the whole thing so why bother
The world is "sane" when the lucid are treated as beacons and the fools are treated as the unfortunate that must stay away from the engines. Insane when the fools are empowered and the bright have to flee for shelter.
Gingras is correct - Springer here tries to censor. I believe
the only way to respond to this is by removing Springer completely.
Science can not survive when private companies such as Springer
begin to censor science, in particular old science.
> Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
And this is also outrageous. Not only do they censor but they charge
people for that. I believe states need to build up a basic scientific
work, in particular for older papers. It can not be that private
entities control access to information here.
> Scarlata suspects Springer Nature’s internal policing software removed the paper
That's even worse. So an internal tool decides what to censor. Imagine
if all access to old articles were controlled by private greedy companies
that run auto-tools, AI, to censor stuff. We need to retaliate here in a
way to ensure open access to science perpetually.
> Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that“detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”
Max is dead, so this is a cop out. But even aside from this, it is incorrect.
Springer has a responsibility to everyone else here. If they censor something
they abused our trust. Such articles should not be held in private hands. The
whole idea of taxpayers paying for something and then Springer, Elsevier etc..
siphoning that money by their paywall, is outrageous. Now that they also censor
information, it is time to take all their privileges completely away.
Either way the Streisand effect will now kick in. Springer has become famous for
trying to cancel Planck. That injustice can not stand, no matter if automatic tools
used it or not (which also shows that these tools are buggy - shame on Springer for
employing buggy tools leading to vile censorship methods).
I don't know much about academia but it seems journals should be cooperatively edited and managed by universities rather than fully privitized. Ideally with an off ramp into public archives after a period of time.
I wrote a whole chapter about Max Planck and his challenges and his legacy in my book "What is light? Wave theory of light and origins of ether in science"
check it out if you are interested
> […] the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
completely unsurprised, given the state of online papers publishing. if you don’t have an subscription or aren’t an organisation member, the fees are insane
Oh even if your org has a subscription, the fees are insane. You just don't see them.
Things are slowly changing but I can't wait for this parasitic business model to collapse for good.
What's most bothersome is there is work for them to do.
How about assigning a real copy editor with subject matter expertise? How about publishing open source libraries that automatically validate and output visualizations for their formats? How about hosting multimedia supplements?
It would not be difficult at all to earn the money they charge. There is so much room for creativity and innovation and adding value in scientific publishing.
That sounds an awful lot like "costs" which seriously compromises the "free profit" model.
Why pay money to make a better product when you can pay zero money for a worse product and no change in subscriptions? What are your customers gonna do, go get the paper somewhere else?
20 years ago, that argument would make sense. They had no competition and could do what they wanted. As an earlier comment stated: that is starting to change, and if they wait until open competitors are fully established, then it will be too late. Now is the time for them to realize that their parasitic business model is coming to an end and they need to change if they want to survive long term.
They can of course choose short term profits over long term viability, which wouldn't be all that surprising, but that changes the explanation from "more profits" to "short-sightedness/incompetence"
They have no competition on any given paper that they hold the rights to.
Well, maybe no competition when we're talking about institutional access rights on dry land. However, for everyone else, there's quite a bit of competition out there in the high seas.
Oh they are very aware of the threat. But their weapon of choice is the legal system and regulatory capture, not improving their product.
Do you think these papers have the economic position they have because they are better than some competitor? Or because they have copyright: they provide exclusive access to some important things ...
Yes, many students and researchers resort to piracy.
The students and researchers weren't the customers, but instead the large institutions they belong to. In a sense, they should be the same from this context, but the amount of consolidation that has occurred in the academic publishing space means that large institutions don't really have the same plausible deniability that their individual members do.
Well, yes. There are several ways to get papers:
https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/
I was involved with arXiv when it first came to Cornell (blame me if you can't get an endorsement!) and we did plenty of analysis about the cost structure of academic publishing.
When we looked at well-run noncommercial journals, like The Physical Review, the cost was justified by exception handling in the peer review process. The average peer review case goes smoothly but if somebody has a complaint and there a lot of appeals and reviews the cost can skyrocket.
Our cost structure was $3-$5 a paper but we struggled to get even that. arXiv was unfunded at Los Alamos and I think Cornell never appreciated the value that it created for the world, had we found a way to capture a few percent of the value we created we would have been "sustainable" but I think that is incompatible with running it on a shoestring the way we did.
I am not enthusiastic about arXiv being independent, I don't have any problem with the high salary they want to pay the director, you are going to pay that for a good non-profit manager in NYC but you could just as easily pay that much for a bad non-profit manager.
I have nightmares though that had arXiv been independent in the 2000s somebody I know might have wound up at Epstein's island not because I think he's evil or perverse but rather because he's naive [1]. arXiv is a gem that would be attractive to somebody like Epstein and would be very possible for somebody like that to have funded it 100% back then. As it is it will be sucked into a somewhat corrupt NGO-industrial complex and end up spending $30-$50 a paper just on fundraising. It's sad.
[1] so many people who got in his circle strike me like children who were playing in the street and got hit by a car, and you'd hope people in those leadership positions should have better judgement
I published in Nature Physics and the copy-editing process was quite embarrassing, to the point where we had to repeatedly nag them to stop them from making the manuscript presentation worse.
To be clear, I’m not talking about subjective style issues, I mean conforming to their own spec and avoiding careless bugs.
All remaining work fell on the backs of the physics referees. I’m not sure what value Springer provided from an editorial standpoint. It was disappointing to say the least after all that hard work.
Right? A lot of journals make a big deal about submitting your manuscript in the proper format (sometimes even LaTeX if you're lucky) and then you get the galley proofs back and half the equations and citations now have typos in them.
The entire publishing process often feels like a chain of "you had ONE job"-type errors from the journals (presumably because they're wildly underpaying and overworking the people whose one job these things should have been).
The fees to publish in journals for authors/labs are insane too.
I'm not familiar here, but if both the publishers and readers are unhappy, why do these services still exist? Is it the 'prestige' of being published with some of these guys? Or do you need to be published for xyz reasons?
Seems like, in 2026, we can have direct publishing without the need of these services? Is it the infra, like query tools and such, that prevent a migration away?
edit: I'm not going to reply to every comment, but thank you all, helps paint the picture a bit better for me!
Publishing is how scientists get their street cred. Thus, the scientists themselves want to publish in big name journals to up their rep - hitting something like Nature is major coup. And then they can convert their standing in the big science gang to things like research grants, commercial projects, academic tenures, etc.
If you don't care about how science street cred works, nothing stops you from just throwing your papers up on arxiv. But then you get no publishing rep. And no visibility either. A big name journal in a given field gets eyes on your paper by default - but in the pits of arxiv, if you don't put your work out there yourself in the circles, no one will see it.
Arxiv is not p2p, is a preview of what will be published hopefully.
Then you had promising projects like Plos, but they sold themselves. They turned into a joke: open access and good IF, but high fees for the author, thus becoming a quick way to get a sub-par paper published "for the points" if your lab can pay the fee. Pay to win, using a gaming term. If you know you have a good paper, you publish on any other (closed) journal with similar IF but cheaper.
It's "not p2p", it's just used like p2p. A lot of papers on arxiv nowadays are "preprints" that will only ever get "printed" on someone's office laser.
The authors who put them up there didn't even plan on publishing in a journal. They just throw their work out there - no peer review, no nothing. Post the link on Twitter and maybe someone in the field will see it and find it useful.
This is especially true in fast-moving and highly applied fields like ML - the fields that are less "big science gang" and more "high intensity corporate R&D warzone".
What I dont understand is why cant we get free open journals with high curation standards that would eventually get to the reputation level of Nature.
Hosting pdfs + paying out reviewers could be covered by donations.
(read the other replies first, I'm going to assume you understand that first!)
There are a lot of researchers writing papers. In many fields it isn't possible to read them all, so you need someone to make a selection of what is useful. Get into Nature any "everyone" will read your paper because it is important. However if you fail that you only get into a small niche publication - the only people who will read your paper are people who search it out - likely because they are in that tiny niche (and have personally met you to discuss this niche at a conference). There are even lower grades up publications which nobody reads, but in theory someone could find it in a search.
What physics papers should a chemist read? If you are a physicist you should be reading more papers, but there are still too many to read them all so you need a selection, but that selection should bias to others working on similar problems to you. The same applies for every other field: you can't know everything so you need someone to apply a selection to tell you what is important for you to know.
A lot of academic reputation, as well as performance evaluation (for example toward tenure) is based on being published in "prestigious" journals. If you could fix that problem, I suspect the parasitic journals would evaporate overnight.
Because the journal is a stamp of approval, and scientists are measured almost exclusively through their publication record. Getting a paper accepted by Nature can make a career.
It's easy for anyone to publish papers online, but it's very difficult for a journal to build credibility and reputation. If you publish in some random journal no one has ever heard of, everyone will assume your paper couldn't get through peer review at a "real" journal.
That's why the established journals exist.
I was going to post that snippet as well.
How much longer are scientists going to continue respecting and embracing the useless parasites that are journal publishers, with their right-out-in-the-open, obvious, intentional grifting. You don't need these jackasses.
What you rely on them for technically, the dissemination of papers, could be done with an $80/mo Kubernetes cluster and like three part-time volunteers.
Now in terms of what they provide for the peer-reviewing process... It's not like they pay reviewers. And most of that money is definitely not going to editors. It appears journal brands are only useful as signals of prestige, but with their ethics increasingly circling the drain, I'm not even sure that trust is well-placed.
When their jobs don't depend on it. (as in it is evaluated for hiring and promotion) Ofc it differs depending on discipline.
The greed of scientific publishers is beyond parody at this point, these companies need to be destroyed.
To be fair, the Springer empty PDF paper for $39.95, has zero errors, and zero plagiarism, so it is above the bar of their other paywalled proceedings papers.
Even emptiness can be plagiarized. See Cage's 4'33"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#Plagiari...
That page says that eight years after the supposed lawsuit "Batt admitted that the alleged legal dispute had been a publicity stunt and that he had actually only made a donation of £1,000 to the John Cage Foundation."[1] I guess that he plagiarized it is sure even if the copyright claim was not litigated.
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-11964995
4'33 is not empty! That is a common misperception. 4'33 is the sound of the ambient space around the listener. Each performance is unique.
IMHO they are both arrogant scoundrels for doing this.
interesting connection to Cage. Maybe Springer Nature also sees the empty pdf as a form of art? :)
While it seems pretty obvious to me that this was an algorithm run amok, I think it's absolutely ghastly that they would retract papers algorithmically without human intervention in the first place.
Retraction is a major deal, and would/could do significant harm to an author (obviously in this particular case I think Max's reputation will be fine). The article states:
> Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”
but I'm pretty sure they didn't contact Max Planck, nor his estate, before retracting the articles. I would be absolutely incensed if I were a living author and had one of my papers retracted without the chance to defend myself.
I think this article encapsulates an ever growing frustration that is only exploding with the rise of AI - we're turning more and more decisions over to black boxes that have no accountability and no easy path for rectification when things go wrong.
> Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
The system is broken
I am still suspicious that this has something to do with the relationship between Springer-Verlag and the Max Plank Digital Library (MPDL) which supports open access.
In 2014 MPDL purchase 110k out-of-print and historically significant titles. In 2015 Springer acquired open-access journals from Max Plank Society. In 2022 There was an open-access book deal allowing Plank Institute members to more easily publish books.
Things were more not always so intertwined and in 2007 the Society canceled a licensing agreement with Springer due to subscription prices and usage restrictions.
> I am still suspicious that this has something to do with the relationship between Springer-Verlag and the Max Plank Digital Library (MPDL) which supports open access.
Why? Max Plank (the dead Physicist) has nothing to do with whatever the Institute is doing these days. Or the library. Or anything that was named after him.
Planck's papers contained multiple em-dashes -- so, clearly he used ChatGPT to write these papers.
He should have known better. </sarc>
and, as the articles points out, it is literally out of copyright.
For profit journals need to die.
You know what is even worse? A lot of what is paid come from public grants and not-for-profit grants. Reviewers are not paid. Editors are mostly other researchers. Authors are required to put the paper in ready-to-process.format. Thus public money funelled into journal pockets.
There is almost zero reasons why the governments or NIH-like institutions don't have their paper repository.
The system is fine. The culture is broken. Scientific publishing isn't forced on the community by regulation or necessity. You can publish papers in infinite number of ways online. Unlike something like healthcare or housing, where there are no alternatives, there are plenty of alternatives when it comes to media publishing.
There are not if you are working in it. Some grants for example include provisions that you publish in tier so and so journals. If that is the case, there might be one of those that is open-access / independent, but more likely there is not.
What they are saying is that this is nearly a 100% self-own. The department and the academic structure sets the KPIs, like where to publish and how much. This is very much a monkey caught with their hand in a jar moment.
"The purpose of a system is what it does"
it's designed that way.
Robert Maxwell, Ghislane Maxwell's father, was a big player in turning the industry towards profit seeking (though I agree with the sibling comment that it's capitalism's fault ultimately).
Downvoting this comment doesn’t make it less true.
Most everyone and everything has been captured by the ultimate cynicism of Capitalism: if I don’t do it someone else will, so might as well put the money in my pocket right??
I agree with @kingleopod — this system is designed to do what it is doing: keep knowledge private and keep profits high. Full stop.
Again, the system is working as intended. Capitalism is a wonderful hack on so many levels.
You forgot the "still" in that sentence.
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Do I understand correctly that publishing the same paper in multiple journals is considered self-plagiarism? Who in the name of the great monopoly invented such name for that?
Generally, yes. Journals expect that the research is new. With most research labs (at least in CS) making their work freely available on the internet, the major value of publication is peer review. In my area, double-blind review is the norm, meaning the reviewers and authors don't know who the other is. Thus it's not clear to the reviewers if the prior research is even yours.
The expectation is you cite the previous work to clearly indicate it is not new, and that your submission for review is mostly about new research. In some situations overlap is okay, e.g. there's a conference version and then a journal version with additional results. In that case you disclose in writing what the delta is to the editor (who knows your identity while the reviewers do not). This also means in the paper you have to treat the prior work as if it is by a different group to maintain double-blind review.
The point is to make it clear what is new research. Trying to get credit for the same research multiple times, and boost citation count, is dishonest to the expectations of the community. It's also a waste of time for reviewers (who volunteer) to review same research over and over again after deciding it's acceptable. Think of it like a OSS maintainer getting pull requests for trivial changes to the code just to boost the green squares on someone's GitHub profile. It's a drain on everyone else and doesn't benefit the project.
The same morons who think that re-using something you have written before in academic work without quoting yourself is (self-)plagiarism for which you should be sanctioned?
(Yes, they are morons because no reasonable person would think this is fair. You need convoluted nonsense arguments to justify this)
It's bad manners and a waste of people's time and attention to present previously published work as novel.
Repeating a phrase or two in a document's introduction isn't going to raise flags from any serious people, but copying data, analysis, or large swaths of text? That's a paddlin'.
I think it depends. The popular exposure to this idea, where you can be accused of self-plagiarism for a paper you write for a class, does seem stupid, because obviously your prof hasn't read your paper you wrote in another class and you're not 'wasting' anyone's time.
I can also appreciate that in a "publishing papers as research" context you're completely right.
That makes no sense, either people don't know about the previous work and thus it has clear value. Or they do and they can easily skip it. Beside for a lot of work it be great if you could just literally copy and paste fragments if your previous work to deepen out some reasoning.
I disagree.
I think you are contradicting yourself. If a previous work has been copy and pasted, and a novel reader doesn't know, wouldn't the reader benefit from the option to actually read the previous work as a whole?
All credible authors I read mentioned quotes from earlier works. In fact, that is on the one hand an ego boost as a prolific writer, and also helps sell more copies in case of being purchasable.
Most credible university profs in Germany from the 1990th for example always referenced their former work and mention changes of the context, or in case of a theory, modifications.
Books for example, are reprinted and it has been mentioned whether changes to the content has been done.
Personally I really see no problem, leaving the decision, whether you copied something or not, to the reader.
Many forums have/had policies about not doing cross posting (in different categories). I find this similar.
Yes, maybe from the "plagiarism" angle is not very relevant, but I would prefer not to have a system in which people try to "flood" repositories (journals, etc) with the same thing over and over. People looking for new information, people reviewing will get most of the burden to "keep things clean" while for the poster that is not a problem.
If they don't know about the previous work, they won't know to go there for more. If they do, it doesn't mean they instantly recognize it and know to skip.
Just mark it, it'll take seconds.
plagiarism, with heavy sanctions, of self is of course ridiculous, but having as a standard that you should cite yourself when doing it is not a bad standard. As a reader, it might trigger a "where have I read this before" reaction which is akin to confusion; also having notice that there is another paper on this topic could be quite useful.
Academics base their careers around citation numbers. You need publications and a high H-index to make it anywhere. Self-plagiarism reduces the effectiveness of that metric, which makes it harder to evaluate the actual impact of a researcher.
It should be no surprise that republishing in multiple journals was accepted in the pre-computer era, where citations were inherently harder to track (and thus less valuable as a metric).
Quoting Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
> Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
If someone else did this, it would've been called scam.
Agreed. The simplest explanation, though, is probably that they used a low quality software tool here. Shame on those software developers who have written it in the first place - they also supported censorship here.
Link to site: https://retractionwatch.com
One of the recent posts:
"A study claiming a tenfold decrease in bugs splattered on evolutionary biologist Anders Møller’s windshield over two decades has been retracted."
What's a "tenfold decrease"?
Inverse of a tenfold increase, so 1/10 aka 0.1x previous number?
x -> x/10
“10x less”
Yeah this seems like a fundamentally anecdotal evidence, if bugs are splatting less on his car windshield
Worse than anecdotal - even if there is real measured data: aerodynamics of windshields will have changed and have an effect and so we still cannot draw conclusions from this. Only if the experiment is more controlled (that is the same car driving on the same roads at the same speeds at the same time) could we draw a conclusion.
We can't draw conclusions from that study because it's been retracted on the basis that data has been faked.
On the other hand there are other similar studies that reach similar conclusions, and specifically try to control for aerodynamics e.g. [1] which says
> The weak positive relationship between vehicle registration year and splat rate suggests that newer vehicles are more efficient at sampling insects than older vehicles.
i.e. they saw more insects on newer cars compared to older ones in the same time period.
In general ecology studies aren't like lab physics, you can't control every possible confounding variable; the systems are too complicated and studies ex-situ have their own limitations. But refusing to engage with the data we do have because it's not perfect isn't going to help you make better decisions, and doesn't represent some moral high ground.
[1] https://cdn.buglife.org.uk/2022/05/Bugs-Matter-2021-National...
I didn't mean we shouldn't engage with data at all. However there are so many possible confounding factors in this type of measurement that we should "take it with a lot of salt."
Same roads doesn't even control. If you lived in a town that e.g. changed the very local environment (say drained one specific swamp), the nearby roads my have less bugs for a very uninteresting reason
That is the interesting reason.
While the retraction brings into question the anecdotal evidence for the windscreen phenomenon ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon ), there are other studies with other sampling approaches that support the global insect population collapse ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations ).
Even if this is true, we should still reject any falsified study that supports it.
I drive a 30 year old Range Rover and I can confirm that I have just about as many bug splats now as I did driving my equally un-aerodynamic Volvo 20 years ago.
Although the funniest one was driving through a cloud of moths on the A9 one summer about 30 years ago in my little Nissan, which hoovered up enough of them to choke the air filter and die on the next (fairly long and steep) hill. They were hell to get off the windscreen too.
> Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
I wish I could say such behavior was shocking. Everything Springer touches turns to shit.
I always feel that people want one central place to prove their abilities, but when that central place becomes corrupted, it's hard to break away from it. Because the authority of that place feels as if it's tied to your own authority
> In November 1940, philosopher Aloys Müller criticized Planck’s views in a Naturwissenschaften piece titled “Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt” (“Natural Science and the Real External World”). A month later, Planck responded in print—and used the exact same title. This, Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect, caused Springer Nature’s copyright bot to retract the paper as plagiarism decades later, even though the contents of the two essays differ markedly.
> The debate over the Copenhagen interpretation remains active today, which explains why Gingras and Khelfaoui find the retractions so troubling: A key scientist’s views on an important controversy have been memory holed.
> Both Scarlata and Gingras are concerned that papers by less prominent scientists have disappeared as well without anyone realizing. At a minimum, Gingras wants Planck’s papers restored. “Whoever did it, I don’t care,” he says, “just put them [back] in the database. Intellectually, it’s not acceptable.”
Thanks, copyright bots.
Why would you need to pay $40 for a PDF of a paper published almost a hundred years ago? What makes the paper not public domain?
You don't. It is public domain. You pay that if you want to get it from them. This is the same as I can get a free pdf of "Linear algebra done right" from Sheldon Axler's website but if I want to get it from Springer I pay $50 or whatever it is.
That is a very confusing state of affairs!
Repackaging and selling free data is a very old business model.
In many cases, it's value-added, because the bundler may also do some curation and interpretation.
Not sure that's what's happening, here, though...
You can also buy licenses to use AV1, a royalty-free codec.
Well, I can't be mad if I ever get accused if Plank has no chance.
Plank is dead and so cannot defend himself. You are at least alive and have a potential to do something (what or if it will work is an open question).
Plank is very famous. If this happens to you, but 50 years after you die: odds are you are not famous and nobody will notice.
"Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95." LOL, what a world we are building.
> Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered “self-plagiarism” and frowned upon today
In other words, publishers want a monopoly on what they publish and take the copy rights away from the actual authors.
> Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”
Was it a bot commenting as well? That's a hilariously tone-deaf response. Guess we'd better bust out the ouija board to ask max plank himself.
I'm sorry, communicating with ghosts is against Springer Nature policy. This isn't a disreputable publication like Séance Monthly!
The acronym for the University of Quebec at Montreal is UQàM not UQ :P
One researcher was at UQAM, the other was at UQTR. Are both not considered part of UQ?
No, both are separate universities, although some universities also have satelite campuses (UDeM (montreal) has multiple).
Edit0: Although UQ is a group of 10 universities that are public, they are not a single entity.
That sounds like the UC or SUNY systems. UCSB, UCLA, etc are all separate institutions with separate missions, but it’s totally normal to say “UC Berkeley” or “UC Santa Cruz.”
The "à" between Québec and Montréal should have "accent grave", not "accent aigu".
As a Montréaler I am ashamed, fixed it.
the Germans have a word for that: "vertrottelt" (in English it is just translated as "stupid", but it conveys much more meaning than stupid)
lol "self plagiarism". Max Planck got an "extra publication."
Counting papers is death. Everything connected with it is death. This is Max fucking Planck, who gave us the photon. We're judging him according to today's "standards." He's "failing."
Ok. So be it. We'll get what we incentivize.
An algorithm did it? Or was the author of apparent sloppily-written machine instructions the actor?
Max Planck published the same paper in multiple journals in the 1940s, which was common practice at the time. He also published a second unrelated paper that happened to have the same title as the paper it was a response to. In 2011 both papers were retracted from their journals' archives, most likely because a bot incorrectly flagged them for plagiarism.
Saved you a click.
You missed the two absurdities:
1. Springer Nature are happily selling an empty PDF for $39.95.
2. Springer Nature responded that they’re not going to tell you why they retracted it, because retraction details are normally only shared with the author (who in this case died almost 80 years ago).
> detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.
Good luck sharing that information with Max Planck. It's amazing how robotically humans can act sometimes. I suppose this could be an AI or automated response, but it's just as likely it's someone following the letter of the law without using any critical thought.
I really wish they would have asked the representative to confirm that they can only share detailed information with the skeletal remains of an author who died 78 years ago. Not that I think it would make any difference, but it would force the representative to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation.
I think this is a good example of Kafkaesque.
This is what invariably happens when you give bots control of important day-to-day business operations: The bot makes some horrendous mistake and then there's no human being around who has the authority, the access, and the knowledge to both revert the bot's decision and make sure that the bot doesn't just replay the error at a later date.
Privatizing gains, socializing loses
Bots and automation aren't inherently bad, but often times the motivation is pure cost savings for the company and users pay the price.
A more rational design could have a periodic human auditing process, appeal/reversal process, and a public audit/action log for clarity. However, that's going to eat into the savings of automating the whole thing so why bother
> “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”
Time for a séance.
So, greed that devoured scientific publication, that's why.
Unfortunately, that's nothing new.
The world has gone mad.
Has it ever been sane?
The world is "sane" when the lucid are treated as beacons and the fools are treated as the unfortunate that must stay away from the engines. Insane when the fools are empowered and the bright have to flee for shelter.
Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95
lol, getting paid for nothing. Highest levels of capitalism
Of course, what they charge $39.95 for is in the public domain. So it's a sort of double scam.
"... chicks for free"
See (and listen to): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0
Gingras is correct - Springer here tries to censor. I believe the only way to respond to this is by removing Springer completely. Science can not survive when private companies such as Springer begin to censor science, in particular old science.
> Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
And this is also outrageous. Not only do they censor but they charge people for that. I believe states need to build up a basic scientific work, in particular for older papers. It can not be that private entities control access to information here.
> Scarlata suspects Springer Nature’s internal policing software removed the paper
That's even worse. So an internal tool decides what to censor. Imagine if all access to old articles were controlled by private greedy companies that run auto-tools, AI, to censor stuff. We need to retaliate here in a way to ensure open access to science perpetually.
> Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that“detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”
Max is dead, so this is a cop out. But even aside from this, it is incorrect.
Springer has a responsibility to everyone else here. If they censor something they abused our trust. Such articles should not be held in private hands. The whole idea of taxpayers paying for something and then Springer, Elsevier etc.. siphoning that money by their paywall, is outrageous. Now that they also censor information, it is time to take all their privileges completely away.
Either way the Streisand effect will now kick in. Springer has become famous for trying to cancel Planck. That injustice can not stand, no matter if automatic tools used it or not (which also shows that these tools are buggy - shame on Springer for employing buggy tools leading to vile censorship methods).
I don't know much about academia but it seems journals should be cooperatively edited and managed by universities rather than fully privitized. Ideally with an off ramp into public archives after a period of time.
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Article was probably flagged as AI written /s
Well I didn't see any counter evidence by Planck so Springer Nature must be right. Otherwise he should defend himself! \s
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ha if Max Planck was proven wrong it would be as bad as proving Einstein wrong
it would break quantum physics
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics#History
To me, this seems like Science dunking on Nature (the journals). It’s interesting, but only a story because Nature is involved.
I wrote a whole chapter about Max Planck and his challenges and his legacy in my book "What is light? Wave theory of light and origins of ether in science" check it out if you are interested
I (and I'm sure others) would be interested in your thoughts on Planck and publishing. Otherwise, the comment is just an advertisement.
Everything is an advertisement and nothing is just an advertisement.