PONE-D-24-08298Finding Common Ground: understanding and engaging with science mistrust in the Great Barrier Reef regionPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Curnock,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, 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 Aug 22 2024 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,

Umberto Baresi, Ph.D.

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 financial disclosure: 

"Funding was provided by the partnership between the Australian Government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, delivered in partnership with CSIRO, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and the Queensland Government’s Reef Water Quality Program. Collection of the survey dataset involved co-investment and in-kind support from the Queensland Office of the Great Barrier Reef and World Heritage, and the five Regional Report Card Partnerships in the Great Barrier Reef catchment region: Wet Tropics Waterways, Dry Tropics Partnership for Healthy Waters, Mackay-Whitsunday-Isaac Healthy Rivers to Reef Partnership, Fitzroy Partnership for River Health, and Gladstone Healthy Harbour Partnership."

Please state what role the funders took in the study.  If the funders had no role, please state: ""The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."" 

If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. 

Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in 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: 

"This research was conducted using data from the Social and Economic Long-Term Monitoring Program for the Great Barrier Reef (SELTMP; https://research.csiro.au/seltmp), with funding provided by the partnership between the Australian Government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, delivered in partnership with CSIRO, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and the Queensland Government’s Reef Water Quality Program. Collection of the survey dataset involved co-investment and in-kind support from the Queensland Office of the Great Barrier Reef and World Heritage, and the five Regional Report Card Partnerships in the Great Barrier Reef catchment region: Wet Tropics Waterways, Dry Tropics Partnership for Healthy Waters, Mackay933 Whitsunday-Isaac Healthy Rivers to Reef Partnership, Fitzroy Partnership for River Health, and  Gladstone Healthy Harbour Partnership. The scientific results and conclusions, as well as any views or opinions expressed herein, are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Government or the Queensland Government and their respective Ministers for the Environment. The authors declare no conflict of interest."

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: 

"Funding was provided by the partnership between the Australian Government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, delivered in partnership with CSIRO, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and the Queensland Government’s Reef Water Quality Program. Collection of the survey dataset involved co-investment and in-kind support from the Queensland Office of the Great Barrier Reef and World Heritage, and the five Regional Report Card Partnerships in the Great Barrier Reef catchment region: Wet Tropics Waterways, Dry Tropics Partnership for Healthy Waters, Mackay-Whitsunday-Isaac Healthy Rivers to Reef Partnership, Fitzroy Partnership for River Health, and Gladstone Healthy Harbour Partnership."

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

4. 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.

5. 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 received glowing reviews, and it will provide a valuable contribution to the literature and to our journal's readership.

Please consider the feedback provided by Reviewer #2. I would suggest the authors to consider providing a bit of information on the Australian political context in relation to the Australian Great Barrier Reef.

Thank you for choosing PLOS One for publishing this high-quality piece of research.

[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: This manuscript is both comprehensive and thorough its content. Having read through and continually had comments I had written addressed by the next page or section read, I have no comments to submit beyond stating that I think this paper should be accepted. The work is insightful, meets the scope of PLOS ONE and I think would be valued by the journals readership.

Reviewer #2: This manuscript describes the results of a large public survey in Australia in the region near the Great Barrier Reef. In particular findings explore public trust in scientific natural resource management as it relates to other attitudes, values, and individual differences. Overall, I found the paper interesting and well written. The methods were appropriate, sound, and well described.

My only note is that some further treatment of how the key variables of values, attitudes toward civic institutions, and trust in science may be related in this region to partisan political identity. The authors touch on these subjects in the intro and discussion. Particularly given the association with some demographic data (gender, industry of employment), the importance of one's identifying with the values and attitudes of one's social group feels like it deserves further consideration here. In the US at least, trust in the realm of policy has become increasingly partisan, making traditional communication strategies to overcome mistrust more complicated to say the least. Even just a bit more coverage of the political context in which management and communication is taking place may be helpful. You touch on some of this in lines ~288-297 for instance, but it left me wanting to know a bit more. For instance, what are the major sources of misinformation in this region specifically and what interests are they bringing to the table.

I'll emphasize, that I don't want to make it seem like I am asking the authors to write a different paper with different questions/aims/variables. I'd just like to to see a bit more concrete grounding for the context and discuss the role of that context in interpreting results and implications.

**********

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.

Finding common ground: understanding and engaging with science mistrust in the Great Barrier Reef region

PONE-D-24-08298R1

Dear Dr. Curnock,

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 will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, 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,

Umberto Baresi, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

On behalf of PLOS One, I would like to thank the authors for their efforts. The paper in its current shape is accepted for publication.

Reviewers' comments: