What mechanism design helps to realize the innovation function of maker-spaces: A qualitative comparative analysis based on fuzzy sets

Jiancun Zheng; Lu Shi; Tianhong Jiang

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0274307

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 29, 2021
19 Jul 2022 Decision Letter - Hao Xue, Editor PONE-D-21-37616What mechanism design helps to realize the innovation function of maker-spaces: A qualitative comparative analysis based on fuzzy setsPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Zheng, 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. Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 02 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. 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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, Hao Xue 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 If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references.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. [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 manuscript is well-written, methodologically sound, and has some very good aspects to consider. The authors have provided a detailed description of the methods used, and results are well-reported. Reviewer #2: Review comments PONE-D-21-37616 Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read this exciting study! This manuscript titled “What mechanism design helps to realize the innovation function of maker-spaces: A qualitative comparative analysis based on fuzzy sets” uses the method of fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyze data from 63 maker-spaces in Zhejiang Province and to study proposes a reasonable mechanism design scheme for maker-space. Given the unique research design, the rareness of the maker-spaces data, and robust results, there is no doubt that it is an important paper and an interesting story to read. My comments are as follows: Major comments: 1. This manuscript has a rigorous for the methodology and research analysis section. I still have some concern on part of it. In line 315-316, and line 318-321, the authors mentioned that they use the raw continuous data, binary data, and level data. Since the sample size is small, it would be great if the author can conduct some robustness analysis to make the results more robust. For example, for the continuous result data, taking logarithm would make the estimate more tolerate to outliers. 2. In the robustness test section, it would be great if the author could add a table here or in the appendix to show the robustness check results. Minor comments: 3. This manuscript has a rigorous contribution to the literature by conducting surveys with 63 valid questionnaires. If allowed, a larger sample size would contribute to a more robustness results. 4. It’s nice that the author also discussed the future research and limitations at the end of the paper. It would be helpful if the limitation is discussed in more details. 5. It might be helpful for readers to clearly understand the results if the figure for the results in the main tables is added. ****** 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: Yes: Denny John 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. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Review Comments for PONE-D-21-37616.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274307.r001
Revision 1
30 Jul 2022 Author Response Dear editor and reviewer(s), We thank you for your generous comments on the manuscript, and have edited the manuscript to address your concerns. According to the review comments, the revised content has been marked yellow in the new manuscript. The following is feedback on the review comments. Major comment 1: This manuscript has a rigorous for the methodology and research analysis section. I still have some concern on part of it. In line 315-316, and line 318-321, the authors mentioned that they use the raw continuous data, binary data, and level data. Since the sample size is small, it would be great if the author can conduct some robustness analysis to make the results more robust. For example, for the continuous result data, taking logarithm would make the estimate more tolerate to outliers. As reviewers can see, this paper does involve different types of data, including continuous data, binary data and level data. As for the concerns about the possible data robustness, in fact, the data analysis methods we have adopted have fully considered the characteristics of different types of data and avoided the problem of outliers. In the application of NCA(Necessary Condition Analysis), according to the application requirements of this method, when both X and Y are continuous variables or discrete variables of level 5 or above, the upper bound function is generated by ceiling regression (CR), otherwise, the ceiling envelopment analysis (CE) is used to generate the function. We can see this kind of treatment in Table 3 of the manuscript. In the application of QCA, according to the application requirements of QCA technology, all types of data are calibrated, so that each data becomes the membership score of the corresponding case on a specific variable set, thus eliminating the differences of data types and the robustness concerns brought by data types. In addition, 63 samples were collected in this paper, which is small compared with the traditional statistical analysis method, but reasonable compared with the QCA analysis method adopted in this paper. Traditional statistical analysis is based on large samples, maximum random process and relatively few variables. The QCA method is a method that integrates qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. This method is case-oriented, analyzing and handling a limited number of complex cases through configuration, and it is a suitable method to handle "small sample" research (Rihoux and Ragin, 2009). In this paper, 63 samples were analyzed by QCA method, which reached the level of "medium samples" in the application of QCA technology. Therefore, the research conclusions obtained should be reliable. Major comment 2: In the robustness test section, it would be great if the author could add a table here or in the appendix to show the robustness check results. Agreed. According to the suggestion of the reviewer, we added a data table of robustness test to the manuscript (Table 7). Please refer to the revised manuscript. Minor comment 3: This manuscript has a rigorous contribution to the literature by conducting surveys with 63 valid questionnaires. If allowed, a larger sample size would contribute to a more robustness results. We very much agree with the reviewer's suggestion of expanding the sample size. Enlarging the sample size as much as possible is more conducive to research work. In this study, the team conducted three rounds of questionnaire to get enough sample cases. However, for various reasons, we regret that only 63 valid samples were obtained. We are willing to do our best to expand the sample size in follow-up studies, such as cross-regional study. Minor comment 4: It’s nice that the author also discussed the future research and limitations at the end of the paper. It would be helpful if the limitation is discussed in more details. According to the suggestion of the reviewer, we tried our best to explain "limitations and future research" in more detail. Please refer to the revised manuscript for details. Minor comment 5: It might be helpful for readers to clearly understand the results if the figure for the results in the main tables is added. QCA technical analysis mainly focuses on the analysis of whether there are reasonable configurations of various antecedents under an interesting result, and its analysis process data is relatively few (Rihoux and Ragin, 2009). In this paper, fsQCA 3.0 software is used to analyze the mechanism configuration that is conducive to the innovation performance of maker-space. The results given by the software are as follows: " fsNSF * fsRGC * ~ fsHRI * FL * AS " and the corresponding consistency and coverage data. To facilitate readers' understanding, we adopted the common methods in previous studies (Greckhamer, 2016, Delmas and Pekovic, 2018), and presented the main table of results in the form of tables, which are composed of various symbols and corresponding consistency and coverage (Table 6). All digital information generated by the analysis has been included. Therefore, we are sorry that we can't add any more data to the main table. In the follow-up research, we are willing to combine other research methods to increase the process data according to the reviewer's suggestion, so as to make our research more perfect. Yours sincerely, Jiancun Zheng On behalf of all authors Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274307.r002
26 Aug 2022 Decision Letter - Hao Xue, Editor What mechanism design helps to realize the innovation function of maker-spaces: A qualitative comparative analysis based on fuzzy sets PONE-D-21-37616R1 Dear Dr. Zheng, 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, Hao Xue Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274307.r003
Formally Accepted
30 Aug 2022 Acceptance Letter - Hao Xue, Editor PONE-D-21-37616R1 What mechanism design helps to realize the innovation function of maker-spaces: A qualitative comparative analysis based on fuzzy sets Dear Dr. Zheng: 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. Hao Xue Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274307.r004

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