AAAS: "Springer Nature restores Max Planck’s mysteriously retracted papers."
We just returned from taking a couple of our grandsons to the San Juan Islands for a few days. For me, this was a computer-free vacation, so in clearing my email inbox from a mountain of dross this morning, I happened upon one high note. "The publisher Springer Nature this week reversed the more than decade-old retraction of two papers by the legendary physicist and Nobel laureate, saying the initial action was based on human error." Publisher reportedly denies a bot was to blame for withdrawing famed physicist’s work.
"The journal that published the papers in the 1940s had quietly removed them in 2011, and the current editor of the journal, now known as The Science of Nature, recently speculated that the decision stemmed from Springer Nature’s internal policing software, which the company denies."
A pair of University of Quebec historians, Yves Gingras and Mahdi Khelfaoui, called the two retractions a distortion of the scientific record. “We still believe that, given the scale of Springer's digitization projects and journal archive, some automated workflow related to copyright screening or duplicate detection flagged the two papers for review."
As they say, the final decision may well have been made by a human, but that does not mean the process began ‘manually.' As I say, 'justice delayed is justice denied.' But in this case, only for a month. I salute these dogged "historians of science." Call me biased, but I think Planck's photograph projects a steely + uncompromising gaze.
