Dear Fabio Crameri,

I am pleased to let you know that your corrections addressed all comments appropriately and that your manuscript is accepted for publication. I am particularly glad to see a basic user guide as supplementary material, and hopefully the discussion about Matlab will help the process of moving the code to a fully open platform. I don't think there is any major difference between Matlab and Python in terms of learning difficulty and I am looking forward to seeing your next step towards opening StagLab even more.

Regards,

Thomas Poulet.
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Update (14th of June 2018)
The open review process has officially closed, but the journal received the following enquiry on the 11th of June 2018, which needs to be mentioned:

"I recently came across this paper gmd-2017-328: Geodynamic diagnostics, scientific visualisation and StagLab 3.0, by Fabio Crameri - Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2017-328, 2018, and I was surprised to see some content that I have already seen on the web and personally utilized not being cited at all. The color ramp with the sin function on top as well as the diagnostic tool for the color
maps are very very much like http://www.peterkovesi.com/matlabfns/index.html#colour yet there is no citation. Worse, the provided colormaps have CC copyright that does not acknowledge the rightful owner.
I have no interest in this matter other than attributing rightful ownership. I do not know either Fabio Crameri or Peter Kovesi. Please investigate this matter, and keep my name out of whatever follows from this."

As part of the investigation, I have contacted Peter Kovesi, who very kindly accepted to review the manuscript and provided the following comments:

"Tomas Poulet,

Regarding the anonymous complaint that my work is not appropriately acknowledged in the paper "Geodynamic diagnostics, scientific visualisation and StagLab 3.0" by Fabio Crameri

I have reviewed the paper. It cites my paper
Kovesi, P.: Good Colour Maps: How to Design Them, CoRR, abs/1509.03700, http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.03700, 2015.
It also cites my code in the context of searching for connected pixels in a matrix:
Kovesi, P. D.: MATLAB and Octave functions for computer vision and image processing
However the link provided in the paper (http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/ pk/Research/MatlabFns/#match) is dated, the typesetting has removed the '~' that should appear before 'pk' and replaced it with a space, and I believe the anchor should be '#edgelink' rather than '#match'
The current (since 2015) and correct link is:
https://www.peterkovesi.com/matlabfns/index.html#edgelink

Given that the author has cited my code for searching for connected pixels (which is very peripheral to the paper) I am surprised that the paper does not cite my MATLAB code for colour map design and analysis, and the code for generating the colour map test image at:
https://www.peterkovesi.com/matlabfns/index.html#colour
The test image is used in Figure 5 and the diagnostic plots of the colour maps at the author's site
http://www.fabiocrameri.ch/visualisation.php
were clearly generated by my code, or code that was inspired by it. While the diagnostic plots for each of the colour maps references my paper there appears to be no reference to my software on that site.

Overall, I accept that the paper does acknowledge my colour map work by referencing my paper. However, ideally, I feel it should also reference my colour map design and analysis software, and software for generating the test image. As the paper is about a MATLAB software package, it is reasonable that it should reference any MATLAB code that inspired or contributed to it.

Regards,
Peter Kovesi

Centre for Exploration Targeting
School of Earth Sciences
The University of Western Australia"

The author has addressed, to my satisfaction, all comments in the final version of the manuscript, adding extra references where needed, both in the text and on his website.

I would like to thank everyone involved for dealing with this matter in a constructive manner: Julia Hargreaves (chief-executive editor), Fabio Crameri and Peter Kovesi.

Regards,

Thomas Poulet.