Researchers and editors are questioning whether automated digitization and copyright enforcement tools are distorting the historical academic record. A report notes that Springer Nature retracted two Max Planck-era papers originally published in the 1940s and later retracted in 2011, with a recent *Science* investigation prompted by Canadian historians at Université du Québec (including Mahdi Khelfaoui and Yves Gingras). The paper now appears as a blank page in the journal *Naturwissenschaften* (owned by Springer Nature), with the retraction notice citing “copyright violation” and historians pointing to the publication’s appearance in other books and journals. In a second case, historians say the paper was removed for a similar copyright reason despite not finding a matching duplicate. The historians’ preprinted arXiv paper argues that withdrawals may reflect “contemporary digitization and copyright-management procedures” applied “anachronistically,” not scientific fraud. The report quotes editor-in-chief Suzanne Scarlata (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), who says she was not aware of the retractions before *Science* contacted her and suspects algorithm-driven removal could have occurred without human review. For university libraries and research integrity offices, the implication is that compliance automation in publishing workflows can create downstream archival errors—raising the need for better human verification before content is retracted or altered.