Young children show negative emotions after failing to help others

Stella C. Gerdemann; Jenny Tippmann; Bianca Dietrich; Jan M. Engelmann; Robert Hepach

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0266539

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionOctober 28, 2021
25 Nov 2021 Decision Letter - Lucas Payne Butler, Editor PONE-D-21-34250Young children show negative emotions after failing to help othersPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Gerdemann, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. Two reviewers have carefully read this paper, as have I. As you'll see, both reviewers expressed considerable enthusiasm about this paper. I share their enthusiasm, and agree that this paper is innovative, exciting, and technically sound. The reviewers have only minor comments that need addressing, and therefore I am inviting you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses these points. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 09 2022 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. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: 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'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Lucas Payne Butler Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 1. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 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. Thank you for stating in your Funding Statement: (Research for this project was partly funded by a ‘Flexible Fund’ grant awarded to R.H.) Please provide an amended statement that declares all the funding or sources of support (whether external or internal to your organization) received during this study, as detailed online in our guide for authors at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submit-now. Please also include the statement “There was no additional external funding received for this study.” in your updated Funding Statement. Please include your amended Funding Statement within your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf. 3. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: (Research for this project was partly funded by a ‘Flexible Fund’ grant awarded to R.H.) We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: (Research for this project was partly funded by a ‘Flexible Fund’ grant awarded to R.H.) Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 4. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. 5. Please include your full ethics statement in the ‘Methods’ section of your manuscript file. In your statement, please include the full name of the IRB or ethics committee who approved or waived your study, as well as whether or not you obtained informed written or verbal consent. If consent was waived for your study, please include this information in your statement as well. 6. We note that Figure 1 includes an image of a participant in the study. As per the PLOS ONE policy (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-human-subjects-research) on papers that include identifying, or potentially identifying, information, the individual(s) or parent(s)/guardian(s) must be informed of the terms of the PLOS open-access (CC-BY) license and provide specific permission for publication of these details under the terms of this license. Please download the Consent Form for Publication in a PLOS Journal (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=8ce6/plos-consent-form-english.pdf). The signed consent form should not be submitted with the manuscript, but should be securely filed in the individual's case notes. Please amend the methods section and ethics statement of the manuscript to explicitly state that the patient/participant has provided consent for publication: “The individual in this manuscript has given written informed consent (as outlined in PLOS consent form) to publish these case details”. If you are unable to obtain consent from the subject of the photograph, you will need to remove the figure and any other textual identifying information or case descriptions for this individual. 7. 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. 8. 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. [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 ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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 ****** 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 ****** 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: The current study found that 5-year-olds in Germany show negative emotional responses after failing to help another person. Whereas, 4-year-olds were less likely to show negative emotional responses. Importantly, children’s negative emotional responses did not differ significantly by whether they are being observed or whether the completion of the task was children’s own goal or another person’s goal. Negative emotional responses were measured by a reduce in children’s chest expansion, which is a creative and novel contribution to the existing literature. Further, the results were strengthened by converging evidence from additional emotion coding. This paper is well-written with clear theoretical motivations. Also, I would like to applaud the authors for their investment of time and effort to the novel paradigm, i.e., body posture recording. I only have minor suggestions/questions for clarifications. 1. In General Discussion, the authors discussed the possibility that children did not distinguish E1’s goal and their own goal (line 851 on p.34). I agree with this possibility as the distinction may not be clear to children. One way to address this in the future research could be to introduce a reward in a task. For example, a child participant receives stickers when they complete a task (child’s own goal condition) or helpee receives stickers when children help the person complete the task (helpee’s goal condition). This way, it could be clearer for children how their helping benefits themselves vs. other. I do not request an additional experiment for this paper, but it may be worth noting this as a future direction in General Discussion. 2. In some places, the authors’ names were omitted. Instead, it read e.g., “[27] found that preschool children..” or “In addition, [37] reported the results..” on page 7. I wasn’t sure if this is due to the journal’s policy or the authors’ mistake in editing. But I just wanted to bring this into attention in case this is a mistake, not a part of the journal’s guidelines. 3. It was confusing that age as a factor (4yos vs. 5yos), but not age as a continuous variable, predicted changes in chest expansion (line 696 on p. 27). From my understanding, age in months is more fine-grained (i.e., high resolution), allowing us to detect an age effect (if any). How can readers reconcile seemingly inconsistent results from the two analyses (one with no age effects and the other with an age effect)? That is, what did the inconsistency occur? Reviewer #2: Before starting my review, I would like to note that I had previously reviewed an earlier version this article for another journal. In the previous version of this manuscript, my main recommendation was adding a final concluding paragraph to tie everything together, and this change has been made in the current version of the manuscript. Therefore, my overall enthusiasm for the paper continues to be very high. Summary: The present paper finds that young children upon not being able to help others show a lower upper body posture. Furthermore, 5-year-olds showed even lower upper body posture than 4-year-olds after failing to help others. Importantly, changes in children’s body posture do not seem to be affected by whether children were observed or not during the session. These findings are interpreted in the paper as children experiencing negative emotions upon not being able to be prosocial. I would like to highlight that this is an important and novel paper that will greatly benefit emotion and prosociality researchers from both developmental and social psychology backgrounds. The paper uses novel methods, namely body posture analyses to investigate whether children show self-conscious emotions (physically) after failing to help others. Despite the relative novelty of the methods, all studies have been preregistered and the paper is very forthcoming with deviations from the planned analyses. Based on the theoretical and practical reasons provided in the manuscript, these deviations and exploratory analyses are very reasonable and supported by the literature. ****** 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: No [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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266539.r001
Revision 1
22 Dec 2021 Author Response Revision of our manuscript entitled “Young children show negative emotions after failing to help others” (PONE-D-21-34250) Dear Dr. Butler, You wrote: “Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. Two reviewers have carefully read this paper, as have I. As you'll see, both reviewers expressed considerable enthusiasm about this paper. I share their enthusiasm, and agree that this paper is innovative, exciting, and technically sound. The reviewers have only minor comments that need addressing, and therefore I am inviting you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses these points.” Response: Thank you for the positive assessment of our work! Below we provide our revisions in response to the points raised by the reviewers in a point-by-point manner. Reviewer #1: (1) “The current study found that 5-year-olds in Germany show negative emotional responses after failing to help another person. Whereas, 4-year-olds were less likely to show negative emotional responses. Importantly, children’s negative emotional responses did not differ significantly by whether they are being observed or whether the completion of the task was children’s own goal or another person’s goal. Negative emotional responses were measured by a reduce in children’s chest expansion, which is a creative and novel contribution to the existing literature. Further, the results were strengthened by converging evidence from additional emotion coding. This paper is well-written with clear theoretical motivations. Also, I would like to applaud the authors for their investment of time and effort to the novel paradigm, i.e., body posture recording. I only have minor suggestions/questions for clarifications.” Response: Thank you for the positive assessment of our work. We have enclosed our responses to the points raised below. (2) “In General Discussion, the authors discussed the possibility that children did not distinguish E1’s goal and their own goal (line 851 on p.34). I agree with this possibility as the distinction may not be clear to children. One way to address this in the future research could be to introduce a reward in a task. For example, a child participant receives stickers when they complete a task (child’s own goal condition) or helpee receives stickers when children help the person complete the task (helpee’s goal condition). This way, it could be clearer for children how their helping benefits themselves vs. other. I do not request an additional experiment for this paper, but it may be worth noting this as a future direction in General Discussion.” Response: This is an interesting point and we have added several clarifications to the General Discussion in response. First, we clarify that the notion that children may have adopted the goal of the experimenter as their own in the help context aligns with previous goal-alignment models of early helping behavior. We also point out that this does not contradict our main interpretation of the results across the two goal contexts, namely that achievement-related motives, in part, can explain children’s motivation to help others (p. 35, l. 874-882): It is also possible that children adopted the goal of completing the tower as their own in both the help and the own-goal contexts, and that children’s emotional response therefore was always the result of not completing a goal that was established by an experimenter (see 58 for a discussion of goal-alignment models of early helping behavior). We cannot rule out this possibility. Indeed, this possibility is consistent with children possessing achievement-related motivations to complete the action in both the own-goal and the help context. Yet, while achievement-related concerns may be the central motive underlying the fulfillment of children’s own goals, there may, in some contexts, be additional motivations underlying children’s helping (e.g., a concern for others’ needs; 57,58). In addition, we have added a paragraph discussing whether children may not have understood the distinction between the help and the own-goal context and illustrate ways in which future work could assess whether children grasped this distinction (p. 35, l. 883 – p. 36, l. 895): Another possibility is that additional training and instructions regarding the different outcomes would have further facilitated children’s understanding of the own-goal and help contexts. Similarly, additional comprehension checks could have been included to assess whether children fully grasped that their actions would fulfil their own goal or the goal of the experimenter. Such improvements notwithstanding, we do think that children noticed the difference between the two contexts for the following reason. In the help context, the experimenter referred to her own need for the tower to be completed several times, while there was no mention of the experimenter’s needs in the own-goal context (see S3 and S7 Appendix). Nevertheless, it remains an important question for future investigations to assess to what extent children understood that their helping actions fulfill others’ needs as compared to fulfilling a goal that children have themselves (see also 57–59 for a more detailed discussion of multiple motivations that may underlie early helping behavior, some of which do not require an understanding that another's needs would be fulfilled). Finally, we agree that measuring children’s emotional response in a context in which there is a more clearly defined difference in the outcome depending on whether the child’s or someone else’s goal is fulfilled would be very interesting. As the reviewer mentions, such a context could be established if either the child or someone else receives a reward depending on whose goal is fulfilled (similar to a costly helping context). We now describe a paradigm like the one mentioned by the reviewer in our General Discussion (p. l. 36, l. 896-903): In future studies, it will be worthwhile to investigate whether and when children express negative emotions after being unable to behave prosocially in a costlier context, that is when children’s own goal and the goal of helping others are not aligned. Such an investigation could reveal when children value being prosocial (e.g., by sharing resources with others) more than achieving their own goals (e.g., by receiving a reward for themselves; see for instance the costly helping context of 60,61). In these contexts, the fulfillment of children’s own material desires would contrast more clearly with the fulfillment someone else’s material needs than in the current study using a rather low-cost helping task. (3) In some places, the authors’ names were omitted. Instead, it read e.g., “[27] found that preschool children..” or “In addition, [37] reported the results..” on page 7. I wasn’t sure if this is due to the journal’s policy or the authors’ mistake in editing. But I just wanted to bring this into attention in case this is a mistake, not a part of the journal’s guidelines. Response: Thank you for pointing out that some of the citations did not adhere to the journal’s reference style guidelines. We have edited the in-text references throughout our manuscript. For instance, the above passages now read as follows (p. 7, l. 161-163 and p. 7, l. 173-175): In one study, Holodynski found that preschool children between 3 to 6 years of age are more likely to show shame (according to the author’s definition) when they fail a task while they are observed than while they are alone (28). In addition, Harter reported the results of interview-studies showing that children at age 5 to 6 only mentioned whether a parent was ashamed of them in response to hypothetical situations in which they failed a task (during an athletic competition; 38). (4) It was confusing that age as a factor (4yos vs. 5yos), but not age as a continuous variable, predicted changes in chest expansion (line 696 on p. 27). From my understanding, age in months is more fine-grained (i.e., high resolution), allowing us to detect an age effect (if any). How can readers reconcile seemingly inconsistent results from the two analyses (one with no age effects and the other with an age effect)? That is, what did the inconsistency occur? Response: We understand that the results are not entirely consistent across different methods of encoding age. At present we could only speculate as to why this pattern of results emerged. We would point out that either way any effect of age was not predicted; therefore, the exploratory analysis using age as a categorical variable is primarily meant to inform future studies. We now point this out in the General Discussion section (p. 34, l. 849-857): Another, more methodological, question raised by the present study is why our analysis of children’s change in upper body posture showed an effect of age when age was coded as a categorical variable, but not when age was coded as a continuous predictor. Indeed, in our preregistration we decided to include age as a continuous predictor in our models because we expected increased power to detect effects of interest when using age as a covariate. We could only speculate as to why this pattern of results emerged. We think the more important conclusion is that no effects of age were predicted; therefore, in our view, the finding that age appears to influence children’s emotional response requires further replication in a study that is adequately powered to detect such effects. Reviewer #2: (1) Before starting my review, I would like to note that I had previously reviewed an earlier version this article for another journal. In the previous version of this manuscript, my main recommendation was adding a final concluding paragraph to tie everything together, and this change has been made in the current version of the manuscript. Therefore, my overall enthusiasm for the paper continues to be very high. Summary: The present paper finds that young children upon not being able to help others show a lower upper body posture. Furthermore, 5-year-olds showed even lower upper body posture than 4-year-olds after failing to help others. Importantly, changes in children’s body posture do not seem to be affected by whether children were observed or not during the session. These findings are interpreted in the paper as children experiencing negative emotions upon not being able to be prosocial. I would like to highlight that this is an important and novel paper that will greatly benefit emotion and prosociality researchers from both developmental and social psychology backgrounds. The paper uses novel methods, namely body posture analyses to investigate whether children show self-conscious emotions (physically) after failing to help others. Despite the relative novelty of the methods, all studies have been preregistered and the paper is very forthcoming with deviations from the planned analyses. Based on the theoretical and practical reasons provided in the manuscript, these deviations and exploratory analyses are very reasonable and supported by the literature. Response: Thank you for the positive assessment of our work! Following the reviewer’s suggestion in a review of this paper for another journal, we added a concluding paragraph to the General Discussion (p. 37, l. 933-p. 38, l. 941): Young children expressed negative emotions (as measured via observational coding and through a reduction in their upper body posture) after failing to help others and after failing to complete their own goal both when they were observed and when they are unobserved. An exploratory analysis showed that 5-year-olds expressed a greater reduction in upper body posture than 4-year-olds. We conclude that young children’s emotional expression indicates that extent to which children feel that helping others is personally binding. Thereby our findings suggest that preschool children develop a concern with helping others that is, in part, motivated by (the anticipation of) negative emotions, like shame or guilt, after failing to help. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response_NegativeEmotionsAfterFailingToHelp.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266539.r002
23 Mar 2022 Decision Letter - Alexandra Paxton, Editor Young children show negative emotions after failing to help others PONE-D-21-34250R1 Dear Dr. Gerdemann, 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, Alexandra Paxton 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 ******** 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: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes 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: Yes 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: Yes 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: The authors have skillfully addressed my comments and questions about their manuscript. I believe it will make a meaningful contribution to the literature. Reviewer #2: The authors were very responsive to all of my comments. The current manuscript is much improved and I have no further suggestions. ****** 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: No https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266539.r003
Formally Accepted
29 Mar 2022 Acceptance Letter - Alexandra Paxton, Editor PONE-D-21-34250R1 Young children show negative emotions after failing to help others Dear Dr. Gerdemann: 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. Alexandra Paxton Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266539.r004

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .