I went back to check on a paper on heather burning which was published a few years ago and found that something had been added to it.
10 January 2019
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0266-6
In the version of this Article originally published, the authors neglected to include information on Competing Interests; this has now been included in all versions of the Article.
You don’t often see this type of notice on a published paper so it obviously grabbed my attention, slightly more than the paper then did. It had slipped my notice that Prof Rob Marrs was so involved with the Heather Trust and with GWCT. Interesting.
And this line in the fairly recently added material caught my eye
R.H.M. was an expert witness in a public inquiry on Heather Burning in 2012, supporting a private client.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0266-6
A public enquiry into heather burning in 2012? There can’t have been many of them, in fact I can only recall one – that regarding Walshaw Moor. I wonder who the private client may have been?
[registration_form]
That would be the same Prof Marrs who was so quick to give his opinion on the Saddleworth Fire last year: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-44648348
No declaration of interest there either, in what in any case was a dreadful piece of reporting, about which I complained to the BBC.
Interesting – at least to me – that your links are to “Nature”. A spokes of theirs was on the wireless in February 2017 (?) talking about the reproducibility crisis in science, citing alarmingly high numbers of papers (not just in “Nature”) where the results could not be repeated by others. All, of course, peer reviewed. Yet people – the Dunning-Krugers of Twatface – bang on about peer review as if it was something to be revered. Perhaps the peers should have their connections to the authors stated. For starters.
I suspect that the addendum you found is an aspect of Nature updating it’s quality control measures. This site is on my RSS feed: https://retractionwatch.com/2019/04/11/authors-have-papers-in-nature-and-science-retracted-on-the-same-day/
Well well well.very enlightening this Mark.Obviously no conflict of interest there then !! Well spotted .