PONE-D-23-30927A study on formalizing the knowledge of data curation activities across different fieldsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Minamiyama,

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Additional Editor Comments:

The authors are invited to design an evaluation on the suitability of the proposed ontology to annotate data curation-related metadata. This is an important comment from Reviewer 1. Please also address all the other comments made by the two reviewers. We will be ready to assess a revised version of the manuscript.

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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: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: N/A

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

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

Reviewer #1: The paper reviews data curation practices across a variety of disciplines, and based on this proposes an ontology to annotate data curation-related metadata. The proposed ontology is aimed to be used in an interdisciplinary setting, to allow cross-domain-compatible curation annotation.

The paper is written and structured reasonably well, although some sentences are hard to parse and I am not 100% sure I understood all details correctly. Some words are used incorrectly (e.g. "compliment" where "complement" is sensible). It is highly recommended to seek assistance of a native speaker (or a LLM) to improve the writing in future revisions.

Regarding the objective of the paper, I am not quite sure what the authors intended. I fundamentally endorse the stated goal of improving cross-discipline data curation annotation practices. Towards this, the authors are working on a very important and relevant problem, and their efforts are very welcome. It is my reading that the proposed ontology is aimed directly at facilitating this. However, if this is the case, I would have expected some form of evaluation on its suitability. Several examples on how it could be used would go a long way towards illustrating its relevance.

Overall, I believe the paper is not ready for publication in its current state. I would encourage the authors to continue their work to revise the paper and resubmit it at a later date. I would suggest that the authors focus the manuscript on the proposed ontology, add substantial documentation and examples of its relevance, and work out and describe deficiencies in the state of the art more stringently. In my judgement, the revisions required exceed what is possible in a major revision.

Other issues:

- The authors translated (mapped) the processes at the interviewed institutions themselves, but these translations are not available with the submission (that I was able to find). Interviewees are limited to Japan. It is unclear how much of a limitation this poses, since e.g. WEKO3 is a common factor among many institutions.

- The technical contribution centers around translating the Data Curation Network vocabularies into an ontology, where the authors have added a structuring categorization based on control structure and process grouping. Are alternative groupings possible? It appears that the ontology is sensible and useful, but this is not discussed in detail at all.

- I was not able to understand how consideration of staffing at the interviewed institutions contribute to the stated objectives. While this can be informative, the authors imply that it is possible to derive staffing requirements, which I find an invalid conclusion without considering further factors such as institution/repository size, submission rates, workflow overhead, etc.

- The authors critique that the Data Curation Network does not have strict hierarchy, but fail to stringently argue why this is needed in the first place. It appears that the problem the authors view is that it is not possible to create a complete process graph using on DCN information, but this is not stated in a comprehensible manner.

Reviewer #2: The study provides a valuable intellectual contribution to understanding data curation activities across domains. The paper is clearly written and presented data collection and analyses well. My only suggestions if possible would be expanding results and discussion. Future research and implications for data mangers and educators in this area would be helpful. Figures may need to be broken up into manageable parts. It is hard in a review to see how these might be presented at publication time, but there is a lot because these are complicated workflows. Overall, very important and challenging work.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Bradley Wade Bishop

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A study on formalizing the knowledge of data curation activities across different fields

PONE-D-23-30927R1

Dear Dr. Minamiyama,

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.

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Kind regards,

Anna Bernasconi, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

The effort made by the authors to show how the proposed ontology can support the annotation of data curation manuals published by non-surveyed organizations enriches the contributions. The work undertaken by the authors tackles complex processes and deserves publication and attention in the research community.

Reviewers' comments: