Author retracts Nature commentary over concerns about section’s sponsorship

Nature has retracted a recent commentary after the author complained that he had been misled by the relationship of the publication to a financial sponsor and told to avoid critiquing work from the institution. The journal says it is revisiting its “editorial guidelines and processes” in the wake of the case. 

Kenneth Witwer, an RNA expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said he had been approached by Nature earlier this year to contribute a piece to one of the journal’s “Outlook” sections.  

Outlook sections are sponsored, and in this case, the supporter was Nanjing University in China. One of the institution’s deans and star researchers, Chen-Yu Zhang, had arranged the section and written an article for it as well — a piece Witwer described as essentially an advertorial for Zhang’s questionable research. [Springer Nature, in comments to Retraction Watch, said that “The Zhang piece is advertorial, is clearly labelled as such and uses a different typeface from editorial content to promote transparency.”]

According to Nature policy: 

Supported content is editorially independent. In this arrangement, a marketing partner pays to align its brand with content already deemed worthy of coverage by our editorial departments. The marketing partner’s involvement is limited to broad agreement on subject matter, governed by a contract. The ultimate approval of any story rests with the editorial department.

The policy also states:

Everyone asked to write for a supplement will be told what they are contributing to and who is sponsoring it. But the supplements editor must emphasise to all writers that their journalism should be unchanged by the fact that a third party is sponsoring the supplement. This is not advertorial.

That’s not how Witwer characterizes his experience. In a June 27 request to Nature to retract the paper, he quotes his editor writing:

I am going to ask you to reframe it so that it reads less like a direct critique of the research from the Nanjing and other researchers, and more a discussion of how much uncertainty remains about the phenomenon of exRNAs introduced through diet. Right now it feels a bit like a report that is mainly showing the flaws in previous studies.

Witwer wrote that the editor 

later suggested that keeping the criticism would make my piece unsuitable for the Outlook:

“it will need some  re-focusing to make it really work. I hope this is something you’ll be able to do so that we can get  the piece into the Outlook”

Witwer told Retraction Watch:

My piece was extensively and aggressively edited, almost beyond recognition, and I was instructed specifically to avoid criticism of researchers from Nanjing University. Even the title was replaced by something I disagreed with [“Dietary RNA is ripe for investigation”] and tried repeatedly to change, but the editor would not change the title or subtitle [“Kenneth Witwer says that RNA in food could have profound effects on the human digestive system and on health more generally.”] I regrettably accepted this because I did not understand that the content was sponsored (!) or that my piece was only one of many covering the relatively fringe concept of dietary RNA.

 Among Witwer’s specific concerns, he said, were that editors: 

-removed valid (and already published) criticism about the Nanjing studies from my piece, specifically stating that I could not be so critical of Nanjing.

-allowed Zhang himself to write a lengthy, inaccurate piece in this Outlook that ignored valid criticism of his work

-allowed highly conflicted individuals like Zhang, [Janos] Zempleni, and others to give a rosy view of their own work that virtually no one shares…at least not anyone who knows it well.

To the editor who commissioned the piece he wrote: 

I am saddened when any science journal engages in behavior that looks like bought-and-paid-for.

To us, Witwer said: 

Since I would not have agreed to publish had I known the sponsor and disproportionate (and unrepresentative) coverage of the topic, I asked to retract.  

Here’s the retraction notice, which appears below Witwer’s article: 

This article has been retracted at the author’s request. The sponsorship and full scope of the supplement were not made clear to him during the editing process. Nature Outlooks editorial guidelines and processes are being reviewed in light of this. We are grateful to the author for bringing this to our attention.

Witwer said he was pleased with the retraction statement:  

I think it’s a good outcome that they have recognized the problem and are taking steps to avoid it. Of course, this doesn’t address the low quality of some of the content in the outlook, including the sponsored piece, which would never have passed a serious peer review (again, contrary to the published guidelines). As one of my colleagues said to me recently, putting the Nature imprimatur on low quality, paid pieces is much more insidious than outright predatory publishing.

We contacted the editor Witwer worked with, who forwarded our request to a spokesperson for Nature, who in turn said they could not immediately provide a comment on the case. 

Update, 7/24/20, 1756 UTC: David Payne, Managing Editor, Careers and Supplements, tells us through a Springer Nature spokesperson:

We strive to ensure that every Outlook offers balanced and impartial coverage of a topic  and is always produced independently of their sponsor. Our decision to commission Dr Witwer for this Outlook was based on this commitment: we wanted to reflect the wider academic debate around dietary RNA. His was a viewpoint that we felt was an important one to include, in order to increase the Outlook’s value to our readers.

We agreed edits with Dr Witwer, as we do with all authors, and these were solely to broaden the focus of his piece in order to widen its appeal to our readership. This is the objective for all edits to Outlook articles.

We can see how our requests could be misconstrued by the author and others once aware of the sponsor, but we would like to reiterate that they were requested only to make the piece more accessible and valuable to our readership.  As soon as we became aware of the concerns of Dr Witwer, we conducted a thorough assessment of our handling of this Outlook and concluded that the most appropriate course of action was to retract the article, as he requested, which we did as quickly as possible. We are now assessing our policies and processes on Outlooks in light of this issue.  

Update, 2030 UTC, 7/24/20: We asked Witwer to respond to Payne’s comments:

“[D]on’t criticize Nanjing” is not ambiguous. The big issue is not my reading skills, but that clear Nature guidelines on both disclosure (obvious) and quality (my opinion, shared by many others) were disregarded: not just for my piece, but across the board.

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