Married women decision making autonomy on health care utilization in high fertility sub-Saharan African countries: A multilevel analysis of recent Demographic and Health Survey

Wubshet Debebe Negash; Getachew Teshale Kefale; Tadele Biresaw Belachew; Desale Bihonegn Asmamaw

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0288603

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionApril 22, 2023
29 May 2023 Decision Letter - Obasanjo Afolabi Bolarinwa, Editor PONE-D-23-11388Married women decision-making autonomy on health care utilization in high fertility sub-Saharan African countries: a multilevel analysis of recent Demographic and Health SurveyPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Negash, 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 Jul 13 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, Obasanjo Afolabi Bolarinwa, Masters 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. We noticed you have some minor occurrence of overlapping text with the following previous publication(s), which needs to be addressed: https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-017-2670-9 https://www.unipid.fi/virtual-studies/globalisation-and-corporate-responsibility/ https://ssphfrontiersfiles.blob.core.windows.net/articles/files/1604905/pubmed-zip/.versions/4/.package-entries/ijph-67-1604905-r3/ijph-67-1604905.pdf? https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/5/e059307.full https://so03.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/jpss/article/view/168910 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341236214_Women's_Decision_on_Contraceptive_Use_in_Ethiopia_Multinomial_Demographic_and_Health_Surve In your revision ensure you cite all your sources (including your own works), and quote or rephrase any duplicated text outside the methods section. Further consideration is dependent on these concerns being addressed. 3. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: "This research has received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not for profit sectors" At this time, please address the following queries: a) Please clarify the sources of funding (financial or material support) for your study. List the grants or organizations that supported your study, including funding received from your institution. b) State what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role in your study, please state: “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.” c) If any authors received a salary from any of your funders, please state which authors and which funders. d) If you did not receive any funding for this study, please state: “The authors received no specific funding for this work.” 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 indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For more information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts: a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide. 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. 6. 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: This manuscript has been reviewed and there are minor corrections to be made. Kindly revise the manuscript in line with the reviewers’ comments. [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: No 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: No ****** 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: No Reviewer #2: No ****** 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: General Comment: Although the paper is well written paper, there are a lot of grammatical errors that need to be attended to. I have pointed out a few to the authors, there are many to be attended to. Generally revision should be needed.The authors have done a good work. Also, the authors need to be consistent with their decimal separator. Abstract Authors need to indicate the lowest and highest prevalent countries Introduction Line 58: it should be depend not depends Line 60: Authors need to support this statement Line 61: Authors indicate findings implied that. Can authors state the region of these findings Line 69: Is education status not a component of socioeconomic position. Authors can say "Women’s decision with regard to the use of healthcare services may depend on their economic position, perception towards modern healthcare treatment, educational status, family size, perceived severity of illness, and previous experience of illness" Line 72: the aforementioned factors "have" frequently demarcated Line 73: Authors indicate "Additionally, various findings......but state only a source Line 78: Authors can add "most" to .....in the countries of SSA Line 84: Statement not clear Methods Study settings Line 98: delete "was" Line 101: replace Africa with SSA unless authors want to refocus their study area to Africa Line 130: Authors should introduce "On" not on Line 130-131: It's confusing Lines 224-226: should be relooked at The authors did not indicate if all the variables were statistically significant for the regression analysis. The p-values for the variables were not stated. This can be added to Table 2 Authors should mention the mathematical formula how to compute ICC and others? Discussion What are the implications of the prevalence in this study? The discussion section needs to be more focused on the implications Authors need to get literature that do not support their findings as well Line 284: What is the justification for the comprehensive nature of this study? Line 294: were should be deleted Recommendation Please minimize your recommendation hence the current one is too long Reviewer #2: First, I would like to appreciation for studying this interesting topic. Overall, the manuscript is good but I would like to forward my concerns and suggestions as follows, The authors should improve the quality of the writing throughout their manuscript. The manuscript would benefit from proof-reading for grammatical and typographical errors. The authors should provide some details on the justification of the study in terms of the study area (why you include high fertility sub-Saharan African countries and the implication of the problem) In the discussion section line 282-285, the author compared the findings with previous studies in terms of similarity or difference. However, the underlying causes for the discrepancies between studies need to be elaborated to increase the depth of the discussion and to allow readers to know more about the situation. Also, the authors should mention the public health importance of in the finding. The study claimed to take a multi-level approach in its statistical analysis. However, the idea of a ‘multi-level’ model in the paper seems somewhat different from classical multi-level models in the statistics literature. The fixed and random effects models required a more detailed concept about the model for better clarity. Line 182-184 , the authors write about terms like ICC, MOR in which the readers may not be familiar to readers who did not have a technical background. It is important to provide a simple and intuitive definition of such technical terms before they are applied. ****** 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.0288603.r001
Revision 1
5 Jun 2023 Author Response Date: June, 2023 To: PLOSE ONE Journal Editorial Office Subject: Submitting a revised manuscript for publication Dear Editor, First of all, we would like to thank you for the opportunity given to revise our manuscript for improvement. We are writing to submit the revised version for consideration of publication in PLOSE ONE journal. We have addressed all reviewers and editorial queries raised. Grammar and spellings have been improved throughout the manuscript by English language experts, and we have made rewording and rephrasing some parts of the paragraphs of the paper accordingly. We also ensured you that the track change option of MS Word has been used to indicate modifications made on the manuscript. Finally, we are submitting a revised article entitled “Married women decision making autonomy on health care utilization in high fertility sub-Saharan African countries: a multilevel analysis of recent Demographic and Health Survey” to your editorial office for consideration of it for publication. We are very grateful to both the editor and reviewers for your comments and suggestions. All the concerns raised so far will have an undeniable impact on improving the quality and readability of our scholarly work. Appreciating your effort and valuable comments, we have provided possible reflections and amended the raised concerns and questions. Kindly find our reflections here. We hope you will consider the revised manuscript acceptable for publication in PLOSE ONE research journal. We have also submitted point by point responses for editor’s and reviewers’ comments. Authors’ Point-by-point response to editor and reviewer comments We are very grateful to both the editor and reviewers for your comments and suggestions. All the concerns raised so far will have an undeniable impact on improving the quality and readability of our scholarly work. Appreciating your effort and valuable comments, we have provided possible reflections and amended the raised concerns and questions. Kindly find our reflections here. We hope you will consider the revised manuscript acceptable for publication in PLOSE ONE research journal. S.no Editor comments Authors’ responses 1 This manuscript has been reviewed and there are minor corrections to be made. Kindly revise the manuscript in line with the reviewers’ comments. Dear editor we are grateful for our comments and prompt responses. We appreciate all your contributions for the scientific world. We accepted all the comments and corrected all the editor and reviewer comments. Reviewer comments Reviewer #1 1 General Comment: Although the paper is well written paper, there are a lot of grammatical errors that need to be attended to. I have pointed out a few to the authors, there are many to be attended to. Generally revision should be needed. The authors have done a good work. Also, the authors need to be consistent with their decimal separator. Dear reviewer, your observations and insightful comments are too important. With regard to the grammatical errors, yes you are correct there may be grammatical errors. We revised the whole body of the manuscript to minimize the grammatical errors. Again we revised the decimal separator. Kindly see the clean version of the manuscript. 2 Abstract Authors need to indicate the lowest and highest prevalent countries Thank you for the input. We added the highest and the lowest prevalent countries in the abstract. Kindly see the clean version of the manuscript at page 3 line 34-35 Introduction 3 Line 58: it should be depend not depends Thank you. We revised and write it as “depend”. Kindly see the clean version of the manuscript page 5 line 59, 4 Line 60: Authors need to support this statement Thank you for the observation. Supported by reference. Kindly see the clean version of the manuscript at page 5 line 61. 5 Line 61: Authors indicate findings implied that. Can authors state the region of these findings Yes we can. We stated the region at page 5 line 62. 6 Line 69: Is education status not a component of socioeconomic position. Authors can say "Women’s decision with regard to the use of healthcare services may depend on their economic position, perception towards modern healthcare treatment, educational status, family size, perceived severity of illness, and previous experience of illness" Of course education is one of the socioeconomic component. We revised as “Women’s decision with regard to the use of healthcare services may depend on their economic position, perception towards modern healthcare treatment, family size, perceived severity of illness, and previous experience of illness” kindly see the clan version of the manuscript at page 5-6 line 71-76. 7 Line 72: the aforementioned factors "have" frequently demarcated Thank you in advance for the important input. We add the word “have”. Kindly refer the clean version of the manuscript at page 6 line 73. 8 Line 73: Authors indicate "Additionally, various findings......but state only a source Thank you very much. We revised it. Kindly refer the revised manuscript on Page 6 Line 75-76. 9 Line 78: Authors can add "most" to.....in the countries of SSA The word “most” is added based on your important suggestions. Kindly see the revised manuscript on page 6 line 80. 10 Line 84: Statement not clear Thank you for your question we made it clear. Kindly refer the clean version of the manuscript page 6 line 86-87. Methods Study settings 11 Line 98: delete "was" Deleted. Page and line: N/A 12 Line 101: replace Africa with SSA unless authors want to refocus their study area to Africa Replaced. Kindly find in the clean version of the manuscript on page 7 line 107. 13 Line 130: Authors should introduce "On" not on Thank you very much. We had revised based on the comment. Kindly see the revised manuscript on page 9 line 135-137. 14 Line 130-131: It's confusing Revised and made clear. Kindly see the clean version of the manuscript page 9 line 135-137. 15 Lines 224-226: should be relooked at Thank you very much. We looked it and take correction too. Kindly see the clean version of the manuscript page 16 line 216-219. 16 The authors did not indicate if all the variables were statistically significant for the regression analysis. The p-values for the variables were not stated. This can be added to Table 2 Dear reviewer we indicated the statistically significant variables in table 3. Kindly refer table 3. 17 Authors should mention the mathematical formula how to compute ICC and others? Dear reviewer thank you for your suggestion. Now we stated all the formulas accordingly. Kindly refer page 12 line 204-216. Discussion 18 What are the implications of the prevalence in this study? The implication of the prevalence of this study is indicated. Kindly see page 21 line 310-311. 19 The discussion section needs to be more focused on the implications Of course we accepted that the discussion should to include more about the implications of the study. The manuscript is revised as per the given comments. Kindly refer the manuscript page 21 line 310-312 page 22 line 329-330, 342-343; page 23 line 361-362, 368-370; page 24 line 376-377. 20 Authors need to get literature that do not support their findings as well Yes, it is recommended to discuss the findings with other researches that do not support our finding as well. We tried to find this and included it. For example you can refer the clean version of the manuscript at Page 23 line 359-362. 21 Line 284: What is the justification for the comprehensive nature of this study? Dear reviewer, the reason why we say comprehensive is because we took the nationally representative data of each high fertility country and pooled together to understand the magnitude of decision making autonomy in health care. Page and line= N/A 22 Line 294: where should be deleted Thank you in advance once again for your key comments. We deleted were. Page and line=N /A Recommendation Please minimize your recommendation hence the current one is too long Thank you for your key observation we accepted your comments and made the recommendation minimized. Kindly see the clean version of the manuscript page 4 line 47-49 and page 25 line 407-411 Reviewer 2 1 First, I would like to appreciation for studying this interesting topic. Overall, the manuscript is good but I would like to forward my concerns and suggestions as follows, Dear reviewer thank you for your appreciation. We positively accept all your comments and respond all the questions accordingly. 2 The authors should improve the quality of the writing throughout their manuscript. The manuscript would benefit from proof-reading for grammatical and typographical errors. Again thank you for your academic suggestion. We accepted your direction and proofread the manuscript. 3 The authors should provide some details on the justification of the study in terms of the study area (why you include high fertility sub-Saharan African countries and the implication of the problem) Dear reviewer thank you for the key observation. We have tried to add justification/reason why we focus on the setting of high fertility country. Kindly refer page 6-7 line 86-98. 4 In the discussion section line 282-285, the author compared the findings with previous studies in terms of similarity or difference. However, the underlying causes for the discrepancies between studies need to be elaborated to increase the depth of the discussion and to allow readers to know more about the situation. Also, the authors should mention the public health importance of in the finding. We accepted your comments. Based on the comment the authors are tried to address the underline causes of the discrepancies. Kindly refer page 21 line 318-321. 5 The study claimed to take a multi-level approach in its statistical analysis. However, the idea of a ‘multi-level’ model in the paper seems somewhat different from classical multi-level models in the statistics literature. The fixed and random effects models required a more detailed concept about the model for better clarity. Of course the authors putted detail explanation for model clarity. Kindly refer the clean version of the manuscript on page 11-12 line 182-200. 6 Line 182-184 the authors write about terms like ICC, MOR in which the readers may not be familiar to readers who did not have a technical background. It is important to provide a simple and intuitive definition of such technical terms before they are applied. That is very important comment. We accepted and provided detailed explanation. Kindly refer the clean version of the manuscript page 12 line 204-216. Kind regards, Wubshet Debebe Negash Corresponding author Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Point by point response.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288603.r002
2 Jul 2023 Decision Letter - Obasanjo Afolabi Bolarinwa, Editor Married women decision making autonomy on health care utilization in high fertility sub-Saharan African countries: a multilevel analysis of recent Demographic and Health Survey PONE-D-23-11388R1 Dear Dr. Wubshet, 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, Obasanjo Afolabi Bolarinwa, Masters 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: No Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 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: Authors have done a good job. However, I still think that it will need another round of English editing as there are some few mistakes. Reviewer #2: “Married women decision making autonomy on health care utilization in high fertility sub-Saharan African countries: a multilevel analysis of recent Demographic and Health Survey” Review decision: Accept The paper is based on a good broad study of married women decision making autonomy on health care utilization in high fertility sub-Saharan African countries: a multilevel analysis of recent Demographic and Health Survey Review decision: Accept The authors address my comments. ****** 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: Fantu Mamo Aragaw ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288603.r003
Formally Accepted
6 Jul 2023 Acceptance Letter - Obasanjo Afolabi Bolarinwa, Editor PONE-D-23-11388R1 Married women decision making autonomy on health care utilization in high fertility sub-Saharan African countries: a multilevel analysis of recent Demographic and Health Survey Dear Dr. Negash: 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. Obasanjo Afolabi Bolarinwa Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288603.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 .