PONE-D-23-03685How many submissions does it take to discover friendly suggested reviewers?PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Presse,

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 Apr 27 2023 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,

Paolo Cazzaniga

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. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript:

“This work is supported by funds from the National Institutes of Health (grant No. R01GM134426 and R01GM130745).”

We note that you have provided funding information that is 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:

“This work is supported by funds from the National Institutes of Health (https://www.nih.gov/) grant No. R01GM134426 and R01GM130745 both awarded to SP.

The funder did not play any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

3. 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.

Additional Editor Comments:

I agree with the reviewers about the quality of the manuscript.

I therefore suggest to accept it after minor modifications, as suggested in the points raised by the reviewers.

[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: I Don't Know

**********

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

Reviewer #1: In this work the authors combined agent-based models to emulate single-blind peer review processes and a Bayesian inference system to set a lower bound in terms of how many papers are necessary to an author to determine the "friendliness" of a reviewer. The results presented show that even in the most simple scenarios, the lower bound is too high for non very prolific authors.

The paper is well written in English.

I suggest to accept this paper after some minor revisions suggested below.

line 46, I think that the term "unfeasibly" should be changed into "unfeasible".

I don't think that a new paragraph is required at lines 84/85.

line 96, the authors forgot to put a "the" before easiest.

I don't know if such a problem is due to the submission process or intended by the authors, but in the latter case I suggest them to remove the red squares around the hyper-text links.

line 203, the authors state "for a fixed a data set", the 'a' after 'fixed' is not necessary.

I suggest to the authors to use vector images, such as pdf images, to strongly improve the readability of the figures and the overall quality of the paper.

In this work, the authors leveraged simple models and already obtained sound lower bounds. Nonetheless, I think it would be interesting to discuss how the lower bounds increase if even more complicated models are considered. I'm aware that this request can be out of the scope of the paper, but models characterized by more realistic rules and numbers can be of interest and give more realistic bounds. I suggest them to evaluate how the boundaries change if an author can suggest more than 3 reviewers and if a large number of impartial reviewers are considered; i.e., the set R is larger.

Reviewer #2: This is a very interesting and, I believe, novel exercise to ascertain how easy it is for authors to influence the publication outcome of their articles by suggesting potentially 'friendly' reviewers. Reassuringly, the answer based on the agent-based model used here is that it is extremely difficult. As the authors state, 'the single-blind review process is sufficiently reliable to allow authors to suggest their own reviewers without clouding or biasing the publication decision.’

Being a non-expert in agent-based modelling, I am not qualified to comment on the methodology used or the accuracy of the interpretation of the results. Actually this may not be too problematic, because many people for whom this work will be of interest may also lack training in ABM, and the authors might consider elaborating some concepts to help understanding. If any of my comments below betray my lack of expertise in ABM, I hope the authors will make allowance for this.

That aside, I do have a few observations and questions relating to the broader questions behind the authors’ work:

• They state that one of the challenges in exploring whether reviewers are positively or negatively inclined is that manuscript history and reviews are ‘kept under lock and key’. This is not correct; some of the studies they cite are based on actual journal data. Moreover, the PEERE group assembled a vast data set that, although now a few years old, could be used to explore the question (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/3IKRGI). If the authors wish to comment in their Discussion on future possible avenues of study, they could encourage others to apply some of their methods to real data sets.

• The modelling is predicated on a binary ‘accept’ – ‘reject’ inclination on the part of reviewers. In practice there is more of a spectrum from positive to negative sentiment on the part of reviewers about a manuscript. This affects the applicability of the ABM and is a limitation that I don’t believe the authors commented on, unless I missed it.

• Authors may submit the same article to multiple journals. How much would this affect the outcome of the model used by the authors? ‘Submission’ and ‘manuscript’ are often used interchangeably, but it seems important to distinguish here between the actual manuscript and the act of submission. Moreover, different journals may set different expectations for reviewers even for the same manuscript – for example, reviewers for a journal that looks for novelty may evaluate the same manuscript differently from how they would evaluate it for a journal that looks only for sound science. This is another layer of stochasticity that should be mentioned.

• Could another layer of stochasticity be that a niche field will have a much smaller pool of reviewers, and possibly also reviewers may be either much more positively inclined towards the author’s work – because they know the author well – or much more negatively inclined towards it – because it competes directly with their own?

• I am not sure I understand why, in the model, authors have access only to the number of positive reviewers, and not also to the number of negative reviews.

• How would the results of the model be affected if potentially friendly reviewers were to decline to review (because, for example, they realise they have a conflict of interest)?

**********

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: Daniele M Papetti

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.

How many submissions are needed to discover friendly suggested reviewers?

PONE-D-23-03685R1

Dear Dr. Presse,

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,

Paolo Cazzaniga

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: I Don't Know

**********

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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Thank you very much for responding to my suggestions and queries. I am happy to recommend the manuscript be published without any further changes.

**********

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: Yes: Daniele M Papetti

Reviewer #2: Yes: Michael Willis

**********