Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 5, 2020
Decision Letter - Hussein Suleman, Editor

PONE-D-20-34753

­­­­­­­­Data Management and Sharing: Practices and Perceptions of Psychology Researchers

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Van Gulick,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Reviewers have indicated that this paper is well-presented and addresses an important and current problem.  Mostly, they indicated that the analysis was acceptable, but there were a few requests for clarification and a few minor errors that need to be fixed.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 10 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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  • A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Hussein Suleman, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

3. Thank you for stating the following in the Competing Interests section:

"I have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: Both authors work broadly in the field of data management and sharing. This project described in this paper was planned and all data was collected before AVG began her position at Figshare. The employers of neither author have influenced the development of the survey instrument, how data was collected or analyzed, or how the conclusions from this project are disseminated."

We note that one or more of the authors are employed by a commercial company: Figshare.

3.2. Please provide an amended Funding Statement declaring this commercial affiliation, as well as a statement regarding the Role of Funders in your study. If the funding organization did not play a role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript and only provided financial support in the form of authors' salaries and/or research materials, please review your statements relating to the author contributions, and ensure you have specifically and accurately indicated the role(s) that these authors had in your study. You can update author roles in the Author Contributions section of the online submission form.

Please also include the following statement within your amended Funding Statement.

“The funder provided support in the form of salaries for authors [insert relevant initials], but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.”

If your commercial affiliation did play a role in your study, please state and explain this role within your updated Funding Statement.

3.2. Please also provide an updated Competing Interests Statement declaring this commercial affiliation along with any other relevant declarations relating to employment, consultancy, patents, products in development, or marketed products, etc.  

Within your Competing Interests Statement, please confirm that this commercial affiliation does not alter your adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials by including the following statement: "This does not alter our adherence to  PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” (as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests) . If this adherence statement is not accurate and  there are restrictions on sharing of data and/or materials, please state these. Please note that we cannot proceed with consideration of your article until this information has been declared.

Please include both an updated Funding Statement and Competing Interests Statement in your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf.

Please know it is PLOS ONE policy for corresponding authors to declare, on behalf of all authors, all potential competing interests for the purposes of transparency. PLOS defines a competing interest as anything that interferes with, or could reasonably be perceived as interfering with, the full and objective presentation, peer review, editorial decision-making, or publication of research or non-research articles submitted to one of the journals. Competing interests can be financial or non-financial, professional, or personal. Competing interests can arise in relationship to an organization or another person. Please follow this link to our website for more details on competing interests: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests

4. We noted in your submission details that a portion of your manuscript may have been presented or published elsewhere.

"The submitted version of this paper has been uploaded to PsyArXiv.

Borghi, J.A. & Van Gulick, A.E. (2020). Data Management and Sharing: Practices and Perceptions of Psychology Researchers. PsyArXiv, " ext-link-type="uri" xlink:type="simple">https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7g3ae"

Please clarify whether this publication was peer-reviewed and formally published. If this work was previously peer-reviewed and published, in the cover letter please provide the reason that this work does not constitute dual publication and should be included in the current manuscript.

5. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This study describes a survey of psychology researchers’ data management and sharing. The methodology is well-described and appears to be sound, the results are clearly described and interpreted, and the potential for participation bias (which seems to be at play here) is rightly noted as a limitation. I believe this represents a solid contribution to the literature on research data management and sharing with a spotlight on psychology, which, as the authors note, is in a time of transition regarding research and data practices, partly motivated by reproducibility concerns.

I have two questions:

1. I was impressed that 8,474 unique researchers had been invited to participate in the survey, but I was disappointed to see that only 274 completed the survey, which represents merely a ~3% response rate. Could the authors speculate on why their response rate was so low? Does MailChimp provide any data on how many invitation emails were actually received and/or opened? Did many respondents start but not complete the survey?

2. The areas where inferential statistics were performed come across as being somewhat “cherry-picked”. Could the authors provide better motivation for these statistical analyses?

Minor points:

Line 174, “After filtering”: I’m not sure what this means. Does this mean “After deduplication”?

Figure 1: I recommend providing verbal labels in the graph legends rather than numerical labels (e.g., 1, 2, 3, . . . ) to faciliate reader comprehension.

Reviewer #2: This is an excellent paper that is well structured and that shows in a transparent way the study carried out, the data collected and the results and conclusions drawn. It complements existing studies on data management / sharing practices well, yet adds new insights on tools and practices used, and the maturity rating of data practices.

Minor correction needed in line 296: Figure 4 should be Table 4.

As suggestion: it would be good to visualize the information in tables 2, 3, 4 as graphs.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Veerle Van den Eynden

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Revision 1

We have confirmed that our manuscript conforms to the style guidelines and that the reference list is complete and correct.

The Competing Interests Statement and Funding Statement have both been updated for clarity as requested in our cover letter.

Competing Interests Statement:

I have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: Both authors work broadly in the field of data management and sharing. AEV is currently employed by the commercial company Figshare. This commercial affiliation does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. The project described in this paper was planned and all data was collected before AEV began her position at Figshare. The employers of neither author have influenced the development of the survey instrument, how data was collected or analyzed, or how the conclusions from this project are disseminated.

Funding Statement:

The funders provided support in the form of salaries for authors [JB: Stanford University; AEV: Carnegie Mellon University (through Jan 3, 2020), Figshare (beginning Jan 6, 2020)], but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.

We have clarified that our manuscript was only posted on a preprint server and has not been peer-reviewed nor published in another journal.

The initially submitted version of this paper was uploaded to the preprint server PsyArXiv:

Borghi, J.A. Van Gulick, A.E. (2020). Data Management and Sharing: Practices and Perceptions of Psychology Researchers. PsyArXiv, https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7g3ae

Preprints on PsyArXiv are not peer-reviewed nor considered to be formally published, thus this submission does not constitute dual publication.

Supporting information files

We have added revised the name of our supplemental file on line 156 and added a caption starting on line 432.

Response to Reviewers

I was impressed that 8,474 unique researchers had been invited to participate in the survey, but I was disappointed to see that only 274 completed the survey, which represents merely a ~3% response rate. Could the authors speculate on why their response rate was so low? Does MailChimp provide any data on how many invitation emails were actually received and/or opened? Did many respondents start but not complete the survey?

Thank you for this question, we have adjusted the language in lines 175 to 181 clarifying that we believe our strategy of sending unprompted e-mails is responsible for the low response rate. We do not have data on how many e-mails were actually received, but we believe this number is still relatively high given that we used e-mails scraped from articles published 1 or 2 years prior to the distribution of our survey. In our discussion section (line 373) we note how our survey – which was explicitly advertised as being about data management in psychology – may have disproportionately attracted psychology researchers with better than average data management practices.

The areas where inferential statistics were performed come across as being somewhat “cherry-picked”. Could the authors provide better motivation for these statistical analyses?

We have added a sentence (line 227) clarifying that these analyses were in line with those conducted in our earlier survey.

Line 174, “After filtering”: I’m not sure what this means. Does this mean “After deduplication”?

This refers to the number of participants who met our inclusion criteria. We have revised this sentence to clarify this point.

Figure 1: I recommend providing verbal labels in the graph legends rather than numerical labels (e.g., 1, 2, 3, . . . ) to facilitate reader comprehension.

Thank you for this comment, we did not provide verbal labels for every value in survey text, so we did not feel it appropriate to add them here. However, we have adjusted the figure legends to further facilitate reader comprehension.

Minor correction needed in line 296: Figure 4 should be Table 4.

Thank you. We have corrected this error, now on line 306.

As suggestion: it would be good to visualize the information in tables 2, 3, 4 as graphs.

Thank you for this suggestion, we decided to use tables to communicate this information rather than graphs because we felt that a graph would not add any additional information.

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to reviewers.docx
Decision Letter - Hussein Suleman, Editor

­­­­­­­­Data Management and Sharing: Practices and Perceptions of Psychology Researchers

PONE-D-20-34753R1

Dear Dr. Van Gulick,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Hussein Suleman, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: V. Van den Eynden

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Hussein Suleman, Editor

PONE-D-20-34753R1

­­­­­­­­Data Management and Sharing: Practices and Perceptions of Psychology Researchers

Dear Dr. Van Gulick:

I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org.

If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org.

Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.

Kind regards,

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Dr. Hussein Suleman

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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