Leading marine ecologist, now White House official, violated prominent journal’s policies in handling now-retracted paper

A marine ecologist at Oregon State University now helping lead the Biden White House’s climate and environmental initiatives violated the conflict of interest policy at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences when she edited a paper in the journal last year.

Jane Lubchenco, who served as administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 2009 to 2013 under President Obama, joined the White House in March of this year as Deputy Director for Climate and Environment in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Last year, while still at Oregon State, Lubchenco, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, was the handling editor for an article titled “A global network of marine protected areas for food,” by Reniel Cabral and Steven Gaines of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and colleagues. Such marine protected areas, aka MPAs, have come under scrutiny, as Yale’s E360 noted in 2019:

In the last decade, governments have been pushing to create vast Marine Protected Areas large enough to protect species from overfishing and other threats. But critics are questioning whether the creation of these large protected areas is driven more by geopolitics than conservation.

Gaines and Lubchenco — who are brother and sister-in-law; Lubchenco was also was one of Gaines’ PhD advisors — had written several articles on MPAs and other subjects together before the paper was submitted, including this piece in Science in 2019. In April of this year, Magnus Johnson, a marine scientist at the University of Hull in the UK, pointed this out in a letter to PNAS editor in chief May Berenbaum:

She has been a co-author with many of the authors of that paper previously (and very recently) e.g. the recent paper in Nature, Sala et al “Protecting the global ocean for biodiversity, food and climate” which cites the Cabral paper twice and obviously has a very similar theme.

It’s obviously really important that the procedures for production of articles in high-ranking journals such as Nature and PNAS are of the highest standard possible.  It seems a little dubious to have a paper edited by an author who is closely aligned with authors on it?  I know it can be tricky to find true independence in the upper layers of international science but surely Dr Lubchenko [sic] should have at least declared an interest?

Earlier this week, PNAS retracted the paper. Here’s the notice, signed by Berenbaum:

The editors are retracting this article. The authors note the following:

“Following publication, we were informed of a data error from the version of the RAM database (RAM version 4.44 and older) that we used in our paper. An updated version of the RAM database exists (RAM version 4.491) that corrects this error, and, notably, the fisheries status of some RAM stocks are improved relative to prior versions. In particular, the inclusion of the erroneous unassessed Trachurus trachurus stock from the older version of RAM used in our analysis led to an overestimate of the potential food benefit from expanding existing global marine protected area (MPA) coverage. Notably, catch benefits from MPA expansion are still positive and substantial once the erroneous stock is removed from the analysis, and the qualitative conclusions of our work remain the same. However, we have been informed that the changes to our results arising from the data error have cast doubt over the outcome of the peer review process, ultimately leading to the retraction of this paper. We intend to submit a corrected version of the paper elsewhere.”

The editors also note that the article’s editor, J.L., recently published a related paper with the article’s authors and has a personal relationship with one of the authors, both of which are disallowed by PNAS editorial policies.

Berenbaum told Retraction Watch that the violation by Lubchenco would have been enough to retract the paper on its own. She said that

each potential COI [conflict of interest] is considered on a case-by-case basis, and, yes, in this specific instance, given the nature of the conflicts in Cabral et al.; i.e., recent close collaborations and family relationship, they would have been sufficient cause for retraction absent the data error…

Cabral, the corresponding author of the paper, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did the OSTP press office, to whom we sent questions for Lubchenco.

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