> […] the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.”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"
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 ...
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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'.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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 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
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.
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."
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.
> […] 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That's why the established journals exist.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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'.
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?
“10x less”
x -> x/10
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.
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.
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
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.
An algorithm did it? Or was the author of apparent sloppily-written machine instructions the actor?
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
> 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!
> 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 think this is a good example of Kafkaesque.
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
So, greed that devoured scientific publication, that's why.
Unfortunately, that's nothing new.
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.
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.
> “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”
Time for a séance.
The acronym for the University of Quebec at Montreal is UQáM not UQ :P
The "à" between Québec and Montréal should have "accent grave", not "accent aigu".
One researcher was at UQAM, the other was at UQTR. Are both not considered part of UQ?
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
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.
To me, this seems like Science dunking on Nature (the journals). It’s interesting, but only a story because Nature is involved.