PONE-D-24-14271Investigating the practices and preferences of health scholars in opening and sharing research dataPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Wibowo,

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. More specifically, the Reviewers have raised important aspects that must be addressed in a revised version of your manuscript:

• Reviewer 1 and Reviewer 3 request more clarity regarding the actual meaning “opening” and “sharing” data. I agree that defining these, partially overlapping but different, terms clearly in the beginning of the manuscript will be helpful for readers. In addition, further clarifications regarding whether and how specific practices are really events of data sharing, e.g., sharing within a research team, are required. I think that a clear definition will be helpful to contextualize and interpret these events.
• Based on the comments and suggestion made by Reviewer 1 and Reviewer 2, I ask you to expand the concluding section and to discuss your main findings in the context of the existing literature (see also Reviewer 1’ s suggestion for restructuring and moving contents from the Findings). Revising the Conclusion may also help you to emphasize what your study adds to the literature compared to previous studies – an issue that has been raised by Reviewer 3.
• Finally, a thorough language editing will be helpful avoid some not well take phrases and to improve the readability of your manuscript.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 18 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,

Bastian Rake

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. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified (1) whether consent was informed and (2) what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). If your study included minors, state whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians. If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information.

3. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure:

“The study is funded by the American Indonesian Cultural and Educational Foundation (AICEF) dissertation travel grant and the Florida State University, School of Information, Esther Maglathlin Doctoral Research Scholarship.”

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.

4. 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.

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.

[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: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: Yes

********** 

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

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #3: 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 reports the results of a survey of US-based health science researchers, which seeks to understand respondents’ attitudes and behaviors around research data sharing. It builds on an extensive (and, here, well-synthesized) body of scholarship examining drivers and barriers of data sharing, taking up these questions in the specific context of the health sciences. The items and fixed-choice options developed for the survey instrument are grounded in the existing literature; I do not have the expertise to comment on the statistical analysis undertaken.

It is notable that the manuscript introduces the phrase “opening and sharing health data” in its opening sentences, without going on to define opening or sharing and how they might differ or overlap. This may sound like a cosmetic point, but uncritically coupling these concepts leads to statements like: “Opening and sharing health research data can be done by making available through data repositories, journal supplements, and peer-to-peer” (lines 117-118). Yet data that is shared privately between peers is, presumably, not open data—in the sense of being “data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone” (https://opendatahandbook.org/guide/en/what-is-open-data/), generally in the context of an open license and/or public domain dedication.

There are moments in the manuscript where I struggle to understand what the authors mean by open. For instance, they report that “surveyed health scholars prefer to share their data through less formal and smaller scope of data-sharing channels. [These scholars] prefer internal and personal methods of opening and sharing health research data instead of through formal repositories and public platforms” (lines 336-339). I see how this statement follows from the data presented in Table 2 and it is an important finding, which confirms a preference for private sharing found in other researcher surveys (https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16731). But would the authors really say that sharing data within a team constitutes opening the data at all? Likewise, they conclude that “informal ways [of] sharing data is [sic] a prevalent practice among researchers, and it is a valuable avenue for promoting open data practices” (lines 770-772). Are the authors suggesting that informal and private sharing may subsequently lead to open sharing and, if so, on what basis?

I am emphasizing this point not to be pedantic about the authors’ use of language, but because research shows that private approaches to data sharing have effects that are different than open approaches. When data are made available upon request, these requests are not infrequently ignored, lost, or subject to undisclosed restrictions (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00981-0). The point here is not that private sharing is bad and open sharing is good. But private sharing does carry system-level costs, even as it may also mitigate some of the risks around data sharing that the respondents perceive, and I would like to see some reflection on this tradeoff in the manuscript (as well as a clearer definitional treatment of opening vs. sharing, as early in the paper as possible).

At a more structural level, I would encourage the authors to consider expanding their Conclusions section and moving some of the more interpretive material from the Findings section (e.g, lines 681-690) down into it. The manuscript devotes quite a lot of space to exploring between-group variance; at times, the import of these findings was apparent to me (e.g., funded researchers are more susceptible to funder policies) but at others, especially around disciplinary differences, I found myself wondering “what’s the takeaway here?”

An expanded Conclusions section could also devote more space to unpacking what I see as a very interesting finding, mostly unremarked upon in this version of the manuscript. Table 6 shows that respondents ranked “to get award, career advancement, and recognition” the lowest among possible motivations to share research data. As the authors note on line 528, this may reflect the fact that, descriptively speaking, “there [are] not many rewards resulting from sharing research data.” But then Table 9 shows that respondents ranked “There is no career reward” fairly low among barriers to sharing research data: much lower than professional/ethical considerations around privacy and confidentiality. Open Science advocates often argue that adoption of practices like data sharing has lagged due to the lack of extrinsic reward and recognition (https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.221460). The results presented here complicate that narrative, and I would very much like to see the authors reflect on what that means.

I look forward to reviewing a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points above; a language edit would also be helpful to smooth out some occasional awkward phrasing, such as “the U.S. was one of the highest numbers of countries” (lines 245-246).

Reviewer #2: In the method section there are some paragraphs that has not too much sense in this section

The U.S. is recognized as one of the leading countries in providing open data and data repositories, with

numerous government institutions and universities hosting health data repositories. In 2019, the

U.S. was one of the highest numbers of countries that provide data repositories and open data

(60). Many U.S. government institutions host open health data, such as NIH (61,62). It is also

very common for U.S. universities to host data repositories (63). Therefore, the U.S. was selected

as the research setting to capture best practices in open and sharing health research data.

I understand that you want to provide some context, but it coud have more sense in the introduction section or into the lit. review

Which version of SPSS ?

In the section results and finding, the excerpts, do not you have demographic data ? age, gender.. please put also this data if you have it.

For example:Different journals and funders have different requirements for data sharing. I generally

follow the minimum data sharing required” (#141, medical sciences, 5-10 years of

experience)

Table 6. You have means and SD. Maybe can be represented into a graphic instead of a table.

In the Results and discussion section there is no discussion against literature. I suggest you to modify the section and provide comparisons with your study with similar studies and provide a discussion.

Reviewer #3: Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper. The paper investigates the data-sharing practices among health researchers.

General Comments:

The article is well-written and well-structured, making it easy to read. The research question is clear, and the theoretical framework and positioning of the paper are quite well articulated. The methodology is thoroughly described, and the analysis is well executed. I commend the authors for the quality of their work in the first submitted version, which is not often the case. The topic is highly relevant in the context of open science, as well as scientific integrity and the reproducibility of results.

Comments on Content:

- The authors provide a comprehensive literature review, noting that many papers have addressed this question using different contexts, methods, and data. All the research questions posed in this article have already been explored. While the analysis is well-conducted, it is not clear what new insights this study provides compared to the existing literature. Although the authors attempt to address this on page 4 (lines 90-96), their study’s positioning relative to existing results is absent from the discussion and conclusion.

- Distinction between "opening" and "sharing" data: The authors distinguish well between these two concepts; however, this difference is not thoroughly analyzed in the paper, especially regarding the distinction of practices across disciplines. For instance, it would be beneficial to highlight differences in practices between disciplines that are more inclined to share data informally (and the reasons for this) and those that emphasize openness.

- In interpreting the results of the "test for group differences" tables, the authors merely describe the tables without providing deeper explanations of the results. This is evident, for example, in Table 3.

- The authors used Kruskal-Wallis tests, which indicate that at least one sample stochastically dominates another. However, this test does not specify where this stochastic dominance occurs or for how many group pairs it is present. Tests like Dunn's tests are used to analyze specific sample pairs for stochastic dominance. The authors seem to use a manual comparison to analyze the significance of differences. If this is the case, they should justify this choice; otherwise, they should employ an appropriate statistical method (which I recommend).

I would recommend publishing this article in PLOS ONE once the above points have been addressed.

********** 

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: Marcel LaFlamme

Reviewer #2: Yes: Juan-José Boté-Vericad

Reviewer #3: Yes: Abdelghani Maddi

**********

[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.

PONE-D-24-14271R1Investigating the practices and preferences of health scholars in sharing research dataPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Wibowo,

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.

While Reviewer 2 is satisfied with the revised manuscript, the two other Reviewers raise some issues that must be addressed prior to publication. My understanding is that the required revisions can be implemented in a straightforward way. More specifically:

• Reviewer 1 asks for further elaborations and clarifications regarding the distinction between sharing research data and open research data. While you have already implemented some changes, I agree with Reviewer 1 that the use of the word “open” requires a careful re-evaluation.
• With respect to your empirical analysis, Reviewer 3 asks for a clearer justification of the appropriateness of the Kruskal-Wallis test in the manuscript.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Oct 17 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,

Bastian Rake

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.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

**********

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: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: N/A

**********

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

Reviewer #3: No

**********

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

Reviewer #3: 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: The distinction between sharing research data and opening/open research data has not been adequately clarified in this revision. Changing the construction "sharing and opening" to simply "sharing" throughout the manuscript is a good start, but the authors have then muddied the waters by referring to "sharing open health sciences data" or "sharing open research data" at numerous points, including in their research questions (lines 97-102).

This construction creates the expectation that all of the data discussed under this category are open, when this is not the case given the examination of peer-to-peer and within-team sharing practices. To my mind, this construction is also confusing because it suggests that the data in question may already have been open before being shared.

I would encourage the authors to take a standard definition of open (data) and then stringently evaluate every usage of the word "open" in the manuscript to see whether it satisfies that definition. I suspect that most of the references to "open" could simply be removed, placing the focus squarely on sharing—whether openly or not.

Reviewer #2: Authors have addressed comments and clear improved the manuscript. Thanks for your effort on improving it.

Reviewer #3: I thank the authors for their response and the revisions made to their article. I carefully reviewed the revised version, and I appreciate the efforts made to improve the clarity of the study's positioning in relation to the existing literature, as well as the distinction between the concepts of "sharing" and "opening" data.

However, regarding the justification for the use of the Kruskal-Wallis test and the manual comparison of groups, I remain perplexed by the response provided by the authors. In their response, the authors indicated that they had "provided deeper explanations of the statistical analyses, including justifications for the choice of statistical methods or considerations of alternative tests." However, after reviewing the revised version with tracked changes as well as the resubmitted version, I did not find any explicit justification for the exclusive use of the Kruskal-Wallis test followed by manual comparisons for analyzing group differences.

It is important to justify this methodological choice or consider appropriate post-hoc tests, such as Dunn's test, to precisely identify which groups have significant differences. Currently, the absence of such justifications or an alternative methodology leaves a gap in the statistical interpretation of the results.

I therefore recommend that the authors revisit this part of their analysis and include a clear justification for the use of manual comparisons following the Kruskal-Wallis test, or opt for a more appropriate statistical method for multiple group comparisons. I would recommend this article for publication once this issue is resolved.

**********

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: Marcel LaFlamme

Reviewer #2: Yes: Juan-José Boté-Vericad

Reviewer #3: Yes: Abdelghani Maddi

**********

[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.

Investigating the practices and preferences of health scholars in sharing open research data

PONE-D-24-14271R2

Dear Dr. Wibowo,

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 the production process you may review the following two sentences as there may be an issue around grammar or wording: 

• page 6, line 158ff., "a survey study to factors ..."
• page 7, line 182ff., "openness is often avoided, such as in the military..."

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,

Bastian Rake

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: