21–28 of 28 posts
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It’s almost like Nature doesn’t expect its readers to know who this Max Planck guy is. :-)
Exactly, it seems that HN can assume a certain level of scientific knowledge among its readers that Nature can't.
> 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.
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:
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While commonly taught in academic settings, I disagree with the notion that it's possible to self plagiarize. It's your own words and not stealing from somebody else.
It's not just academic. If I've been paid for writing something original for a magazine or newspaper and I give them a piece that wholly or largely is just a copy of something I've written in the past (and has been published elsewhere), that's actually not kosher and they'll call you on it if they find out. Personally, I will reuse sentences and paragraphs from time to time but not entire pieces without an explanator…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s almost like Nature doesn’t expect its readers to know who this Max Planck guy is. :-)
Exactly, it seems that HN can assume a certain level of scientific knowledge among its readers that Nature can't.
The previous posted article was posted on science.org, managed by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) not Nature, which is a British publication.
The organization that did the removal was Springer Nature, parent of the publisher of Nature. It was reported in several places, the one linked here was on a site affiliated by a completely different organization.
Also, science.org is open to everyone, their articles are written and titled for any level of knowledge and any background. Ars and HN are very specific in their target audience and write to that. Even then the comments will be filled with complaints if things aren't written in a manner approachable to anyone.
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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 ha…
While commonly taught in academic settings, I disagree with the notion that it's possible to self plagiarize. It's your own words and not stealing from somebody else.
Plagiarize comes from plagiarius, latin for ‘kidnapper’.
You cannot kidnap yourself
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Agreed. The concept of “don’t reuse your old work when you’re supposed to be creating new work” may be valid, especially in training environments, but it shouldn’t be called self-plagiarism or treated like plagiarism.
It's not really a great term but, at the same time, calling it fraud--which it sort of is in some contexts--feels kinda strong.
If your goal is to share information, you want quality articles in multiple places so that people can get to them. If your goal is to use journal publishing count as a professional metric, then double publishing becomes unethical.
The modern equivalent would be to declare it unethical to share an article on both Reddit and HN.
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It's not really a great term but, at the same time, calling it fraud--which it sort of is in some contexts--feels kinda strong.
The problem is that journals become a way to fill a CV and justify tenure and grants rather than a way to disseminate information. If your goal is to share information, you want quality articles in multiple places so that people can get to them. If your goal is to use journal publishing count as a professional metric, then double publishing becomes unethical. The modern equivalent would be to declare it unethical to…
Discussed a couple days ago: Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck (science.org) 389 points, 196 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48686834
I notice how the title by Ars Technica is much less baity than Nature: "Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?" vs "Why did this journal retract two 1940s papers by Max Planck?"