Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- 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
by nijave - Well, I can't be mad if I ever get accused if Plank has no chance.by segmondy
- 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.
by bluGill - 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.by seanhunter
- 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 authorityby jdw64
- > 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.
by p_j_w - > 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 Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.”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.
by 0xAstro - s/If some else did this/If ordinary citizens did this/
Wealthy companies getting away with fraud is unfortunately business as usual.
by soraminazuki - 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.by shevy-java
- 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."
by khurs - Yeah this seems like a fundamentally anecdotal evidence, if bugs are splatting less on his car windshieldby raverbashing
- What's a "tenfold decrease"?by NopIdoN
- > 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.
by Sweepi - 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?by Artoooooor
- 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."
by StableAlkyne - 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.
by iracigt - 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)
by bborud - > 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
by ashenke - You forgot the "still" in that sentence.by TheRealPomax
- 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.by lxe
- "The purpose of a system is what it does"
it's designed that way.
by kingleopold - and, as the articles points out, it is literally out of copyright.
For profit journals need to die.
by Quarrel - 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.
by kurthr - 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.
- > […] 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
by bstsb - The greed of scientific publishers is beyond parody at this point, these companies need to be destroyed.by anigbrowl
- Good thing sci-hub exists…by jrflo
- 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.
by xp84