alt Hacker News> The specific reason for the retractions was copyright violation, so there was nothing wrong with the actual papers from a scientific standpoint.
There is a reason why the German portmanteau word "Zensurheberrecht" ("Zensur": censorship; "Urheberrecht": the related concept to copyright in German law) exists.
Replies
aap_ • today at 9:54 AM
Never heard this, but very accurate. thanks :)
adolph • today at 2:52 PM
> German portmanteau word "Zensurheberrecht" ("Zensur": censorship; "Urheberrecht": the related concept to copyright in German law)
The recent podcast about Machiavelli by Dwarkesh had an interesting part about how the Catholic Inquisition, printmakers and authors collaborated in censorship to establish an early version of copyright. Link to the specific section:
The so-called copyright violation was that Max Planck had published the same article in 2 journals, which was not unusual at that time, because different journals had different readerships, so publishing in more journals was necessary if you wanted to reach more people.
So supposedly he plagiarized himself.
The second retracted article was even less justifiable, because the modern editors or their automated system had believed that 2 articles were the same, but they were not, they only happened to have the same title.