Based on the two reviews and my own reading, I am pleased to accept your manuscript entitled “XLUM: an open data format for exchange and long-term data preservation of luminescence data” for publication in Geochronology pending minor to moderate revisions, depending on your response to this letter.

Both the reviewers and myself agree with the need to record raw data in a human-readable ASCII format. You have chosen an XML format, but you could have also chosen JSON. In fact, line 363 of the manuscript points out that “JSON has gained popularity over XML in recent years”. So I am curious why you used XML. The example of Section 5 would look cleaner in JSON than XML.

For example, OSL timestamps and signals are stored in vectors of equal length. The XML code places these two vectors at different hierarchical levels of the ‘curve’ tags. Using an abridged version of the example:


293 303 313 323 333 343 353 363 373 383


JSON would allow you to store the same values in a two-dimensional array, which better represents the information content of the data. For example:

curve: {
duration: 10,
signal: [[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10],[293,303,313,323,333,343,353,363,373,383]]
}

Since it is quite easy to convert JSON to XML and vice versa, I would suggest that you consider providing both options. Or instead of specifying a specific format, perhaps you could simply propose a schema that can be applied to any database format?

Other comments:

Section 1 is well written and makes a convincing case for sharing raw data. I hope that other geochronometers will follow OSL in doing this.

Line 7: too many commas
Line 21: typo -> “Rechereche”

On line 67, there is a sudden change of pace. Whereas the previous paragraphs required no specialised knowledge of OSL, point 2 of this enumerated list suddenly moves on to advanced R packages without properly introducing them. I also wonder if the list really needs 5 items, since items 2 and 3 seem to make broadly the same point.

Line 104: Please avoid double brackets between references.
Line 105: Replace “At last some format conventions, hereafter we will” with “In the remainder of this paper, we will” or something along those lines.
Figure 2: What is the purpose of the equation? Either explain it or remove it.
Caption of Figure 2: “the minimum and maximum values”... of what?

Section 3 contains a long list of requirements, several of which are redundant. I suggest replacing all instances of “should” and “shall”. For example, replace “The format should preserve…” with “The format preserves…”.
Line 162: remove “nearly”
Line 165: rephrase “2003, the year of the article by Bortolot and Bluszcz (2003);”
Line 219 and Equation 1: what is the relationship between ‘v’ and ‘A’?
Line 222: instead of using two levels of subscript (e.g., $A_{(2,1)}_1$), I suggest using 3-dimensional arrays (e.g., $A_{(2,1,1)}$).
Figure 6: What is the difference between the top and bottom panel? Both have the same horizontal axis and are labelled “PMT-luminescence in [cts] ‘measured’”.
Line 380: “The notion of open data is access and insight” is not a proper sentence.
In general, Section 7 is too wordy and vague. Please sharpen and shorten.

Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions. Thank you for submitting your work to Geochronology.

Dear Sebastien and colleagues,

I am pleased to accept your manuscript for publication in Geochronology.

Many thanks for considering Geochronology for your research.

All the best,

Georgina