"Competing interests" not disclosed? retraction?

Question

I have recently come across this paper in Nature Communications: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17419-7

From the authors’ affiliations and corresponding email it seems like all authors are employees of Babylon (a health technology company) but the authors state in the “Competing interests” section that “The authors declare no competing interests.” even though they are evaluating their own product and give themselves an outstandingly good evaluation.

The journals “competing interests” policy states: “Funding Research support to the author or their institution (including salaries, equipment, supplies and other expenses) by organizations that may gain or lose financially through this publication. A specific role for the funder in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript, should be disclosed. Employment Recent (while engaged in the research project), present or anticipated employment by any organization that may gain or lose financially through this publication.” https://www.nature.com/documents/nr-competing-interests.pdf

I wonder how it is academically legal to still state “The authors declare no competing interests.”? Is this not the mother of all competing interests? Especially in a respected journal like Nature Communications?

EDIT:

I found this here:

"Editors should consider retracting a publication if:

[...]

The author(s) failed to disclose a major competing interest (a.k.a. conflict of interest) that, in the view of the editor, would have unduly affected interpretations of the work or recommendations by editors and peer reviewers."

https://publicationethics.org/node/19896

Should I contact the editor? Is this really a reason to retract this paper?

Answer 1

Assuming that their company can potentially gain from their research results, this is a clear violation of the signed competing interest declaration. The fact that the authors' affiliation is a company does in no way remove their obligation to declare a potential competing interest. In fact, Springer Nature specifically includes present employment as an example of a competing interest that must be declared:

Recent (while engaged in the research project), present or anticipated employment by any organization that may gain or lose financially through this publication.

Whether or not you should contact the editor is up to you and depends on how sure you are that their company does in fact have a competing interest. If so, then the violation is pretty obvious (although bear in mind that just because the authors work for a company in the field does not automatically mean they have a competing interest). If Nature Communications doesn't think this is relevant you can then follow up with a question here, how inappropriate the academic community thinks their lack of action is and how strong your case is that the company has a financial interest in these results. But I would expect their editor to act on this information and issue a correction or a retraction.

Springer-Nature is one of the world's most important and biggest publisher of scientific results. Their policy is not a weird aberration but represents the norm of a large scientific community. This requirement to explicitly declare any competing interests is standard in many scientific fields (such as biomedical research). For example, Elsevier also requires authors to explicitly declare their competing interests, and authors can only declare that they have no competing interest if they certify the following:

The authors certify that they have NO affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest, or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

In the example here, the authors would not be able to sign such a statement because they do have an affiliation with an entity with an interest in the subject matter.