The above comment by PLOS ONE has been unfairly attached to my article while ignoring many other articles deserving similar comment. The comment is also misleading and omits many relevant details about their communications with me since my article’s publication.

In 2015, within five days after publication of the article, a complaint from an unnamed outside party instigated a review of this article by PLOS ONE. PLOS ONE conducted the review but took no further action, despite threatening to post an Editorial Expression of Concern (Sarah Bangs pers. comm. 2015). Three years later in 2018, PLOS ONE reopened their review with “reinvigorated efforts” (Renee Hoch pers. comm. 2018) without even notifying me directly that they had done so, but they again took no further action. Four years later in 2022, PLOS ONE yet again reopened their review, also without a stated reason for doing so. Unbelievably, PLOS ONE then decided a comment was necessary, ~7.5 years after publication of the article. The best explanation for this episodic harassment is obviously that one or more complainants are carrying on a petty vendetta against me personally, against the institutions discussed in the comment, and/or against the conclusions of my article.

In discussions with PLOS ONE in 2022, I reminded them, as I had done before, that there are at least 14 other PLOS ONE articles other than my own written by over 40 different authors referencing the three contested repositories that would be deserving of similar online comment (Erickson et al. 2009; Franzen et al. 2009; Bell 2012; Frey & Tischlinger 2012; Maidment et al. 2012; Foth & Rauhut 2013; Griebeler et al. 2013; Preuschoft & Klein 2013; Stevens 2013; Wedel & Taylor 2013; Upchurch et al. 2015; Lund et al. 2016; Mallon et al. 2016; Woodruff & Foster 2017). PLOS ONE responded to me in an email that they were now adopting a unique set of exceptions to their quoted policy (Renee Hoch pers. comm. 2022). As such PLOS ONE has unfairly singled out only mine and three of these other articles for comment (Foth & Rauhut 2013; Griebeler et al. 2013; Stevens 2013). Furthermore, there are many other instances of articles appearing in PLOS ONE where the paleontological specimens discussed were owned by private institutions or individuals, and even more egregiously, instances where specimens are known to have been destroyed and therefore clearly below their purported standard of accessibility.

There are several broad issues here:

1) The underlying philosophy of policies pushed by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP), from whom PLOS ONE had sought opinion on my article in 2015 via an unnamed representative, is not shared by many in the professional science community. Attempting to bar publication on specimens ostentatiously deemed by SVP to be ‘unethical’, even if they are completely accessible, is detrimental to science in general and ultimately provides no incentive for private owners of fossils to make their specimens accessible to researchers or to donate them to repositories subjectively deemed by SVP to be ‘accessible and permanent’. Often, as is the case for my article, authors have no control over the ownership status of the specimens, and they do not deserve to be harassed for circumstances that are out of their hands simply for doing their jobs as researchers. More in-depth criticisms of this philosophy can be found in various articles (e.g., Rauhut 2018, Geological Curator; Haug et al. 2020, PalZ; Saitta 2020, PaleorXiv).

2) The published policy on the PLOS ONE website (https://journals.plos.org...) is not as specific, clear, or objective as PLOS ONE believes it to be.

3) The evolving and additional exceptions to the rule, which are not part of the PLOS ONE published policy, that have been put forth in our intermittent email discussions over the years have clearly been thought up in an effort to limit comment to as few other articles as possible. PLOS ONE, realizing that far too many articles would be affected by strict adherence to the policy, invented exceptions to the rule, thereby avoiding placing comments on dozens and dozens of articles.

It is shameful that PLOS ONE has decided to offer its editorial functions as a tool for inappropriate, unprofessional, and unethical behavior by my colleagues. This behavior should be readily apparent by briefly perusing publicly available articles and media that reveal the conflicts of interest stemming from the research topics, pet hypotheses, and personal feuds held by those almost certainly submitting complaints against the publication of my paper. PLOS ONE could have also compared the number of peer-reviewed rebuttals to my article in the scientific literature (of which there is only one – Mallon 2017, Paleobiology) to the number of times (three) over ~7.5 years that PLOS ONE has sought to censor my paper to the more than 25 times my article has been cited in the literature. PLOS ONE is demonstrating how not to do science. It might also be worth asking what PLOS ONE hoped to gain by commenting on my article so many years after publication; the article has been viewed over 28,000 times, so the data is now out in the literature and public awareness.

Throughout their correspondence with me over the years, PLOS ONE has continued to ‘shift the goalposts’ and has presented ever-evolving criteria to be met, presumably as an excuse to sanction my article but not others. Of the three new exceptions PLOS ONE most recently raised to me through email (Renee Hoch pers. comm. 2022), none seem to be stated in any of their published policies as far as I can tell and can therefore be argued to represent an unfair narrowing of attention to the four articles while allowing PLOS ONE to arbitrarily exempt others.

Based on their most recent email communication, there are three new PLOS ONE exceptions to the stated rule that “Any specimen that is erected as a new species, described, or figured must be deposited in an accessible, permanent repository (i.e., public museum or similar institution)”.

PLOS ONE Exception 1: “…the article was published before our Paleontology and Archaeology Policy was implemented in 2012…” (Renee Hoch pers. comm. 2022).

The best examples of articles in PLOS ONE of why this pre-October 2012 exception is problematic are Maidment et al. (2012) and Frey & Tischlinger (2012).

Maidment et al. published in May of 2012 and included not only SMA specimens, but four of the exact same stegosaur specimens that I studied. One of which (SMA DS-RCR-2003-02) was later purchased (prior to my article’s publication) by the Natural History Museum in London (where Maidment is employed), while the other three (SMA 0017, SMA VF01, SMA 0092) are still SMA specimens to this day. All four of these specimens were used in k-means cluster analysis by Maidment et al. (2012).

Frey & Tischlinger published in March of 2012 and described in detail a specimen of a pterosaur being ‘stabbed’ by a fish, which is not only a WDC specimen, but is/was also presumably owned by Interprospekt, given that it is prominently featured on their website.

The SVP position, which PLOS ONE has adopted nearly word-for-word, has been held for many years prior to 2012. SVP has long considered it, albeit falsely, ‘unethical’ to publish on any specimen not meeting the criteria and continues to believe so. How can PLOS ONE take the position that for articles published prior to 2012 no comment is necessary, but articles after 2012 must have a comment? The specimens did not magically change in the year 2012, and as far as SVP is concerned, the pre-2012 articles were just as allegedly improper as the post-2012 articles.

Put another way, for articles published prior to adopting the policy, PLOS ONE is now aware that they do not meet their current purported standards. Therefore, it would be consistent to comment something like, "While the stated policy was not published until 2012, we are now aware that some of the specimens reported on might not meet our current standards". Otherwise, PLOS ONE is now aware of the supposedly ethical problem but chooses to ignore it and not put others on notice. Either the repositories are acceptable in relation to publication or not.

PLOS ONE Exception 2: “…the article discussed previously published results reliant on specimens from the repositories of concern, but the PLOS article was not the primary research report for these findings…” (Renee Hoch pers. comm. 2022).

A quick search of Google Scholar reveals that these contested institutions have had specimens published in a variety of peer-reviewed scientific journals and academic books (e.g., WDC: Mayr et al. 2005, Science; JRDI: Bell 2012, PLOS ONE; Murphy et al. 2013, Indiana University Press). Most relevant would be the papers that preceded my own that included data (including destructive histological analyses) from the exact same SMA stegosaur specimens (SMA 0017, SMA VF01, SMA 0092) that are challenged in my article in both PLOS ONE (Maidment et al. 2012) as well as in the SVP’s own Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology (Hayashi et al. 2009; Redelstorff & Sander 2009), whose publication policy PLOS ONE is clearly trying to parrot. If PLOS ONE claims to make this second exception to their published publication policy, then why are they targeting my use of these SMA specimens despite not being the first to publish on these specimens? Here we see a very clear example of unfair treatment.

As for the Maidment et al. (2012) PLOS ONE article, these exact SMA stegosaur specimens (SMA 0017, SMA VF01, SMA 0092, and also SMA DS-RCR-2003-02 at the time) are all used as data in the K-means cluster analysis prior to my article (Maidment et al. 2012, see table S6 therein). One of those four specimens in Maidment et al. (2012) (SMA DS-RCR-2003-02) was even privately owned at the time, for sale, and moved between two different institutions (SMA and the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research – another repository PLOS ONE would surely be keen to investigate), before being purchased by the Natural History Museum in London (where Maidment is employed) years after publication of that article. In my article, this specimen is now catalogued as NHMUK R36730. How could PLOS ONE comment on my article but not Maidment et al. (2012), which uses not only the same repository, but even the exact same fossil specimens in their analysis three years before my article? Maidment and others also referenced NHMUK R36730 (this time listed as SMA S01) in an even earlier study in a different journal (Maidment et al. 2008, Journal of Systematic Palaeontology).

The policy adopted by PLOS ONE explicitly states that the supposed minimum standard required of the repository is applied to “any specimen that is erected as a new species, described, or figured”. All the articles that they have deemed to not deserve comment clearly erect, describe, or figure one or more specimens from the repositories of concern. This PLOS ONE exception completely ignores the language of the rule and even ignores the language of SVP.

The best example from an article in PLOS ONE of the problem with this exception is Woodruff & Foster (2017). First, they describe in detail a new Camarasaurus specimen that was excavated by JRDI. Although it resides in the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Malta, Montana (founded in only 2008; population of Malta in 2021 was 1,847), this museum was itself founded in affiliation with JRDI and by JRDI staff, as I understand it. Not only that, but the museum would also seem to fall short of PLOS ONE’s standards in the same manner as WDC or SMA since it describes itself as a private organization:

“The Great Plains Dinosaur Museum is a private nonprofit 501(c)3 organization run by a board of community members. It receives no city, county or federal funding for its operational costs.” (https://greatplainsdinosa...).

Second (and perhaps this point is not apparent to non-paleontologists), Woodruff & Foster (2017) are only able to give complete, proper study to this specimen via comparison with SMA fossils. Their taxonomic diagnosis would not be possible if they performed it without this comparison and contrast to SMA and other fossils. Therefore, their scientific conclusions would indeed be “reliant on” the SMA specimens.

How could PLOS ONE comment on my article but not Woodruff & Foster (2017) for what is essentially the exact same standard of repositories?

In science, data is data. Any attempt to delineate what data a paper is “reliant on” or to distinguish what constitutes “primary research reports” in cases where data is later reanalyzed, replicated, reproduced, critiqued, modified, incorporated into larger datasets, incorporated in meta-analyses, etc. will ultimately be entirely subjective.

As for the first part of this exception to the rule, can PLOS ONE provide an objective explanation as to how it is calculated that an article’s result is reliant on certain data? In a study with multiple results or conclusions, how are results quantified, and how many then need to be reliant on the problematic data? How is the data quantified, and how much of a dataset then must be problematic for a single result/conclusion to be deemed reliant on it? As one can see, there is no way PLOS ONE can consistently formulate an objective criterion by which to meet the purported standard across highly diverse articles and incomparable research methodologies.

As for the second part of this exception, how can an article referencing one or more problematic specimens/repositories be ethically acceptable, so long as they are not the first to discuss them? How is this secondary work not “describing or figuring” a specimen as set forth in the rule? In cases where a researcher is not the first to reference the problematic data or specimen, at what point does novel reanalysis of the data using different methods constitute “primary research”? If a second article were to reexamine my data using a completely different statistical method than my own (as did Mallon 2017, Paleobiology), would that constitute “primary research”? If a second article were to record entirely different data (e.g., measurements) and examine a completely different hypothesis and research question, but used the same fossil specimens, would that constitute “primary research”?

For articles naming, describing, or picturing specimens first published by others that do not meet whatever the current PLOS ONE policy actually is, allowing subsequent articles to describe or picture the ‘unethical’ specimens deserves a comment along the lines of: "This article cites or reports on specimens which do not meet our current policy standard". Otherwise, PLOS ONE is saying it is ‘ethical’ to use ostensibly ‘unethical’ specimens in an article, as long as the author is not alleged to have committed the original breach of policy.

It does not matter what percentage of an article’s data is from specimens in those repositories, whether those specimens are referenced in the main text, figures, tables, or supplemental material, whether those specimens are being referenced for the first time or not, or whether PLOS ONE subjectively deems an article’s result to be “reliant on” certain specimens. If a fossil from one of the unacceptable repositories is referenced in any way, that is a scientific argument drawing upon evidence/data from that specimen, and it must be treated in an equal manner. Otherwise, PLOS ONE is clearly singling out certain articles and researchers while protecting others. This would even seem to meet the standard of the vague policy wording on “describing” specimens – every one of the 14 articles I list describe specimens from one of the three challenged institutions to build their scientific argument.

PLOS ONE Exception 3: “…the specimen was reported as having previously been in a repository of concern but thereafter moved to a repository for which no concerns have been identified” (Renee Hoch pers. comm. 2022).

What exactly is an “accessible, permanent repository”? All three of the repositories marked by PLOS ONE as questionable are accessible to researchers (I was even readily granted access to all the specimens as an undergraduate student), so the only issue is the meaning of “permanent”.

It is worth noting that the founding dates, to my knowledge, of the three challenged institutions in my paper are as follows: 1993 for JRDI, 1995 for WDC, and 1992 for SMA. The fact that these institutions have been around for roughly 30 years understandably gives me reason to categorize them as appropriate for long term fossils curation (i.e., “permanent”). Contrast that to the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum (GPDM), the tiny privately owned repository of the specimen in Woodruff & Foster (2017) where Woodruff was affiliated at the time, that was founded in 2008 as essentially an offshoot of JRDI. Does PLOS ONE consider GPDM to be a repository for which there are no concerns?

While another PLOS ONE Maidment et al. article (Maidment et al. 2015) was published after the specimen NHMUK R36730 was obtained by the Natural History Museum in London, I find it laughable that the details of the specimen immediately prior to their 2015 article (and during research published in other journals by many of these authors that included this specimen) does not raise any supposed ‘ethical’ concerns to PLOS ONE, whereby it was privately owned, for sale, and moving between the Black Hills Institute and SMA.

Does PLOS ONE investigate the deaccession policies that, as far as I can tell, exist in almost every major, established museum, public or private? To give just two examples, among the most prominent private and public museums in the US, both the American Museum of Natural History (http://collections.paleo....) and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (https://www.si.edu/conten...) have deaccession policies that allow for the sale of specimens in some cases.

Furthermore, there are countless examples of published fossils in various repositories that have either been lost, damaged, deaccessioned, etc., such that the specimens are no longer “accessible”. Has PLOS ONE shown any concern to any of those articles in the journal?

I am curious if PLOS ONE has commented on any PLOS ONE articles that studied ‘Stan’ the Tyrannosaurus rex (BHI 3033), which was privately owned by the commercial fossil outfit Black Hills Institute prior to being put up for auction at Christie’s in late 2020. The specimen now belongs to Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism (news the Department only publicly announced two years later in 2022) to be placed in a museum that currently does not even exist yet, with an opening projected for 2025 (five years after the specimen was ‘lost’ at auction). The specimen is a major source of data in at least two PLOS ONE papers (Bates et al. 2009; Hutchinson et al. 2011) and was also referenced in or included in the datasets of at least four other PLOS ONE papers (Wolff et al. 2009; Persons et al. 2011; Hendrickx & Mateus 2014; Dececchi et al. 2020).

Similarly, it does not seem that PLOS ONE has published comments or Expressions of Concerns on any article that has described destroyed specimens from the National Museum of Brazil (Museu Nacional) in Rio de Janeiro, after 20 million items were lost in a fire in 2018 (https://www.bbc.com/news/...). I do not know exactly how many PLOS ONE articles include these destroyed specimens, and there may be many. However, a quick search for the repository name reveals many articles in diverse scientific disciplines (including paleontology and erections of holotype specimens) published in their journal before and soon after the 2018 fire (bearing in mind that scientific studies often take years from initial research to final publication) that appear to reference specimens from this museum (e.g., Kellner et al. 2014; Ferreira et al. 2015; Maestri et al. 2015; Giupponi et al. 2016; Lopes et al. 2016; Manzanilla et al. 2016; Nunes-de-Almeida et al. 2016; Pegas et al. 2016; Aguilera et al. 2017; Guedes et al. 2018; Piacentini Pinheiro et al. 2018; Rebouças et al. 2018; Alitto et al. 2019; Buchmann et al. 2019; Zeppelini et al. 2019; etc.). These specimens are almost certainly destroyed and therefore totally inaccessible.


I propose that an additional exception to PLOS ONE’s first three exceptions to the non-publication policy might be: 4) the specimens are owned by purportedly questionable institutions that have been around for at least 25 years and have remained accessible to researchers over this period. Such specimens should be deemed to meet the standards because it is clear that research and publication best serves science within the purposes of the policy.

After the last of the three contacts from PLOS ONE and the insertion of their comment, I sought legal advice to determine some way to halt this recurring crusade against my article. I have been advised that, in the event of a fourth contact from PLOS ONE, I should provide PLOS ONE with a complete list of every article published by PLOS ONE before and after adoption of the SVP-inspired policy that includes a taxonomic erection, description, or figure based on a specimen maintained in a questionable repository. If PLOS ONE refuses to comment on any of these articles, and in particular if PLOS ONE seeks to rely on their self-created exceptions to the policy to spare some articles from comment, the attorney indicated there will be sufficient grounds for legal redress. I do not believe the SVP or PLOS ONE policy is beneficial to science, so I do not want to undertake this, but I do not wish to continue wondering whether or not PLOS ONE will be in contact with me every three to four years when they are again approached by a third party with likely a personal vendetta.

Evan Thomas Saitta, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Chicago
Research Associate, Field Museum of Natural History

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