Sexual and gender identities and alcohol use during the COVID-19 pandemic

Susan D. Stewart; Wendy D. Manning; Kristen E. Gustafson; Claire Kamp Dush

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0308925

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionFebruary 15, 2024
1 Jul 2024 Decision Letter - Hong-Van Tieu, Editor PONE-D-24-05598Sexual and gender identities and alcohol use during the COVID-19 pandemicPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Stewart, 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 Aug 15 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. 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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 note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. 3. Please include your full ethics statement in the ‘Methods’ section of your manuscript file. In your statement, please include the full name of the IRB or ethics committee who approved or waived your study, as well as whether or not you obtained informed written or verbal consent. If consent was waived for your study, please include this information in your statement as well. 4. 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: Discussion section should be expanded on. For example, the findings that "Gay or lesbian persons drank significantly more frequently than did heterosexual persons, and cisgender women drank less frequently than did cisgender men. These findings are consistent with previous research." More context can be provided with prior research findings, with references cited. Please check grammar in the paper. For example, in the discussion, "measure" should be plural: multiple measure of alcohol use Describe why other substance use, besides alcohol use, was not explored in the analysis [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 ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: 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 ****** 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 ****** 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: A. I think it is a very interesting paper that is assessing the relationship between alcohol use and gender identity. And having the added dimensions of minority stressor and support factors as well as the Covid-specific measures provides important insight into the potential dynamics with alcohol use. There are some statistical questions that may help enhance the results as well as some sections of text which need clarification/reconciliation with the tables. B. Major issues: 1. The early time period of the study data may be qualitatively different than the later time period of the study data so it might be useful to examine potential time period effect. In the text and as a footnote there is a reference to the Month of the interview as a covariate, but I was unsure of the finding. 2. I think it would be interesting to include the results for Minority Stress, Supportive climate, Covid Stress and Covid Disruption by Sex ID and Gender ID. 3. You used OLS for the regularity and number of drinks outcomes but did these measures follow a normal distribution? 4. You have number of drinks, but it might be informative to add a Binge Drinking outcome even if there isn't a standard definition. 5. You found Age to not be associated but it might be useful to examine bivariate associations between Age cohorts and your outcomes for potential non-linear relationships. Minor issues: 1. Line 253 - based on your description of the measure and the mean value=3.1, doesn't the mean value correspond to the 1 or 2 days a week response category 2. Line 259 seems like you need to add "Results not shown" for clarity. 2. Line 260 need accompanying SE 3. Line 264 The "80% have children" needs to be fixed so that it matches the table. 4. Table 1 For the Age row you have "mean" in the label column, but it should be "range" 5. Line 275 is not clear to me because the Odds for Transgender/another gender identity is not similar to cisgender man, it is similar to cisgender woman, but the effect was not significant 6. Line 289 I am not sure what this means b/c Model 1 indicates that there is a significant difference in drinking alcohol to cope between sexual identity groups 7. Table 4 Employed part-time seems like the coefficient should be negative 8. Line 319 You are saying full sample but then saying those that did not drink in the last 30 days isn't that a subset of the full sample, please clarify this sentence. C. Misc. remarks (Other points) None ****** 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 ******** [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.0308925.r001
Revision 1
19 Jul 2024 Author Response Journal 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 We have reviewed these templates and our manuscript is in this format. 2. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. This has been corrected. 3. Please include your full ethics statement in the ‘Methods’ section of your manuscript file. In your statement, please include the full name of the IRB or ethics committee who approved or waived your study, as well as whether or not you obtained informed written or verbal consent. If consent was waived for your study, please include this information in your statement as well. We added the following statement in the Methods section: “The study was approved by The Ohio State Behavioral and Social Sciences IRB (#2018B0246) and The University of Minnesota (STUDY00013894). Consent was established at the beginning of the survey. Respondents were shown and reviewed the fully informed consent, and the survey only continued if positive consent was obtained by selecting ‘I consent.’” 4. 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. We have reviewed our references and they are complete and correct with no changes. Additional Editor Comments: (1) Discussion section should be expanded on. For example, the findings that "Gay or lesbian persons drank significantly more frequently than did heterosexual persons, and cisgender women drank less frequently than did cisgender men. These findings are consistent with previous research." More context can be provided with prior research findings, with references cited. We have omitted this sentence, because unlike most previous research, we break LGBTQ+ into very specific identities and therefore provide a more nuanced understanding than prior studies. Therefore, we state: “Our results are consistent with minority stress theory and previous research on the particularly negative impact of the pandemic among LGBTQ+ people, as indicated by greater alcohol use among some groups, higher scores on microaggressions, COVID-19 stress and disruption, and lower scores on climate (Hughes et al. 2020; Kneale and Bécares 2021; Manning and Kamp Dush, 2022; Schuler et al. 2020). However, because we identified differences in drinking patterns between LGBTQ+ groups, researchers should avoid making blanket statements about alcohol use and this population.” (2) Please check grammar in the paper. For example, in the discussion, "measure" should be plural: multiple measure of alcohol use Thank you. We have checked again for errors and have made corrections. (3) Describe why other substance use, besides alcohol use, was not explored in the analysis We have carefully considered expanding our analysis to other substances and have decided to continue to limit our analysis to alcohol use for several reasons. Alcohol is normative and legal and most other drugs are illegal and is associated with greater societal disapproval. Previous studies of LGBTQ+ populations have shown different sets of variables are associated with the use of alcohol versus other drugs. Our measures are also not consistent across substances. We had noted in our discussion that examining drug use is an important next step. Reviewer's Responses to Questions Reviewer #1: A. I think it is a very interesting paper that is assessing the relationship between alcohol use and gender identity. And having the added dimensions of minority stressor and support factors as well as the Covid-specific measures provides important insight into the potential dynamics with alcohol use. There are some statistical questions that may help enhance the results as well as some sections of text which need clarification/reconciliation with the tables. We very much appreciate this reviewer’s careful reading of our paper and have responded in detail to each of their concerns below. B. Major issues: 1. The early time period of the study data may be qualitatively different than the later time period of the study data so it might be useful to examine potential time period effect. In the text and as a footnote there is a reference to the Month of the interview as a covariate, but I was unsure of the finding. That is correct. We did include month of interview in our analysis but did not include it in the tables. The month of interview did not have a significant effect on any of our measures of alcohol use. This is now noted in the text: “Month of interview was not associated with drinking to cope, regularity, or amount consumed (results not shown).” 2. I think it would be interesting to include the results for Minority Stress, Supportive climate, Covid Stress and Covid Disruption by Sex ID and Gender ID. We agree. In the initial submission, we had included two statements about these relationships but did not show our results. We realize these statements could have been clearer. Therefore, we clarified how COVID-19 stress, COVID-19 disruption, microaggressions, climate, were related to sexual identity and gender identity. We have included the following statements in the revision: Results Section: “In other analyses not shown, we found that COVID-19 stress, COVID-19 disruption, microaggressions, and climate were related to sexual identity and gender identity. Across samples, people with an exclusively gay/lesbian, exclusively bisexual, and multi/another sexual identity scored significantly higher on COVID-19 stress and disruption, as did cisgender woman and trans/another gender identity in relation to cisgender man. People with a multi/another sexual identity scored significantly lower on climate than did exclusively heterosexual people, as did those with a trans-another gender identity in relation to cisgender man. Those with an exclusively gay/lesbian identity and those with a multi/another sexual identity scored significantly higher on microaggressions than did exclusively heterosexual people, as did those with a trans/another gender identity in relation to cisgender man.” Discussion Section: “Our results are consistent with minority stress theory and previous research on the particularly negative impact of the pandemic on LGBTQ+ people as indicated by their higher scores on microaggressions, COVID-19 stress and disruption, and lower scores on climate.” 3. You used OLS for the regularity and number of drinks outcomes but did these measures follow a normal distribution? We thank this reviewer for their attention to this. We checked the distributions of both of these variables. Both are skewed but only number of drinks meets the threshold for a negative binomial model (i.e., the variance is higher than the mean). We reran the analysis using this model. Only one coefficient, for exclusively bisexual, was meaningfully changed in size or significance. This is noted in the text. 4. You have number of drinks, but it might be informative to add a Binge Drinking outcome even if there isn't a standard definition. We agree. We ran logit models using two measures of binge drinking: (a) 4+ drinks (standard for women), and (b) 5+ drinks (standard for men), among people who drank in last 30 days. Our results with respect to gender identity mirrored our findings with respect to number of drinks. Cisgender women had lower odds of binge drinking than cisgender men (both measures). Transgender/another identity had lower odds of binge drinking (5+ drinks) relative to cisgender men. Sexual identity was not associated with binge drinking. We have noted our binge drinking findings in the text. We added this text to the Results. 5. You found Age to not be associated but it might be useful to examine bivariate associations between Age cohorts and your outcomes for potential non-linear relationships. We checked the effect of age cohort by replacing mean age with categories of age. No age category was associated with drinking to cope (ref. group 20-29), similar to our previous findings. We had reported that mean age was not associated with regularity or number of drinks—this has been revised. People age 30-39 and 40-49 drank significantly less regularly than people age 20-29. With respect to number of drinks, people age 30-39 drank significantly fewer drinks than people age 20-29. C. Minor issues: 1. Line 253 - based on your description of the measure and the mean value=3.1, doesn't the mean value correspond to the 1 or 2 days a week response category Thank you. This has been corrected in the text. 2. Line 259 seems like you need to add "Results not shown" for clarity. Thank you. This has been added. 3. Line 260 need accompanying SE We are now using categories of age. 4. Line 264 The "80% have children" needs to be fixed so that it matches the table. The text has been corrected to read “31%.” 5. Table 1 For the Age row you have "mean" in the label column, but it should be "range" We are now using categories of age. 6. Line 275 is not clear to me because the Odds for Transgender/another gender identity is not similar to cisgender man, it is similar to cisgender woman, but the effect was not significant How we worded this was confusing. We have revised the text to say, “Compared to cisgender men, the odds of drinking to cope were significantly lower (22%) for cisgender women. The difference in drinking to cope between people with transgender or another gender identity and cisgender men was not statistically significant.” 7. Line 289 I am not sure what this means b/c Model 1 indicates that there is a significant difference in drinking alcohol to cope between sexual identity groups We agree this text was confusing. We have revised the text to say, “We also compared drinking alcohol to cope among all sexual and gender identity groups and there were no significant differences beyond those previously described (results not shown).” 8. Table 4 Employed part-time seems like the coefficient should be negative That is correct. This has been fixed. 9. Line 319 You are saying full sample but then saying those that did not drink in the last 30 days isn't that a subset of the full sample, please clarify this sentence. We apologize for the error. The sentence has been revised to read, “Moreover, models were repeated comparing the full sample (including those who did not drink in the last 30 days) and the smaller sample (drank in the last 30 days).” Journal 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 We have reviewed these templates and our manuscript is in this format. 2. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. This has been corrected. 3. Please include your full ethics statement in the ‘Methods’ section of your manuscript file. In your statement, please include the full name of the IRB or ethics committee who approved or waived your study, as well as whether or not you obtained informed written or verbal consent. If consent was waived for your study, please include this information in your statement as well. We added the following statement in the Methods section: “The study was approved by The Ohio State Behavioral and Social Sciences IRB (#2018B0246) and The University of Minnesota (STUDY00013894). Consent was established at the beginning of the survey. Respondents were shown and reviewed the fully informed consent, and the survey only continued if positive consent was obtained by selecting ‘I consent.’” 4. 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. We have reviewed our references and they are complete and correct with no changes. Additional Editor Comments: (1) Discussion section should be expanded on. For example, the findings that "Gay or lesbian persons drank significantly more frequently than did heterosexual persons, and cisgender women drank less frequently than did cisgender men. These findings are consistent with previous research." More context can be provided with prior research findings, with references cited. We have omitted this sentence, because unlike most previous research, we break LGBTQ+ into very specific identities and therefore provide a more nuanced understanding than prior studies. Therefore, we state: “Our results are consistent with minority stress theory and previous research on the particularly negative impact of the pandemic among LGBTQ+ people, as indicated by greater alcohol use among some groups, higher scores on microaggressions, COVID-19 stress and disruption, and lower scores on climate (Hughes et al. 2020; Kneale and Bécares 2021; Manning and Kamp Dush, 2022; Schuler et al. 2020). However, because we identified differences in drinking patterns between LGBTQ+ groups, researchers should avoid making blanket statements about alcohol use and this population.” (2) Please check grammar in the paper. For example, in the discussion, "measure" should be plural: multiple measure of alcohol use Thank you. We have checked again for errors and have made corrections. (3) Describe why other substance use, besides alcohol use, was not explored in the analysis We have carefully considered expanding our analysis to other substances and have decided to continue to limit our analysis to alcohol use for several reasons. Alcohol is normative and legal and most other drugs are illegal and is associated with greater societal disapproval. Previous studies of LGBTQ+ populations have shown different sets of variables are associated with the use of alcohol versus other drugs. Our measures are also not consistent across substances. We had noted in our discussion that examining drug use is an important next step. Reviewer's Responses to Questions Reviewer #1: A. I think it is a very interesting paper that is assessing the relationship between alcohol use and gender identity. And having the added dimensions of minority stressor and support factors as well as the Covid-specific measures provides important insight into the potential dynamics with alcohol use. There are some statistical questions that may help enhance the results as well as some sections of text which need clarification/reconciliation with the tables. We very much appreciate this reviewer’s careful reading of our paper and have responded in detail to each of their concerns bel Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0308925.r002
29 Jul 2024 Decision Letter - Hong-Van Tieu, Editor PONE-D-24-05598R1Sexual and gender identities and alcohol use during the COVID-19 pandemicPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Stewart, 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 12 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, Hong-Van Tieu Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 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: Thank you for responding to the comments and making the requested edits. Please see below for minor revisions: Please review and make spelling checks throughout manuscript. Some noted corrections needed below: Line 187, spelling correction for COVID-19 Line 198 add “years” to Age ranged from 20 to 60 Line 200 were surveys completed in Spanish included in the analysis? ..were collected on-line in Spanish and English from September 2020 to April 2021.. Line 242 check paragraph indentation Line 387 there is an extra period. cisgender men. . [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] [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.0308925.r003
Revision 2
31 Jul 2024 Author Response Please advise as to how to fix this issue. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers2.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0308925.r004
2 Aug 2024 Decision Letter - Hong-Van Tieu, Editor Sexual and gender identities and alcohol use during the COVID-19 pandemic PONE-D-24-05598R2 Dear Dr. Stewart, 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, Hong-Van Tieu Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0308925.r005
Formally Accepted
29 Aug 2024 Acceptance Letter - Hong-Van Tieu, Editor PONE-D-24-05598R2 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Stewart, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, 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 customercare@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. Hong-Van Tieu Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0308925.r006

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