Perhaps the request is not valid because:
- The reviewer missed relevant data,
- The request is outside of the paper's scope, or
- The request is not reasonable (it's too time consuming or costly, the harm-benefit is imbalanced, etc.)
You understand the request and do not think you need to perform additional experiments.
Provide a detailed explanation, with references, for:
- Why the evidence you have provided is reliable and valid
- Why the additional experiments are outside the scope of the article, infeasible, or unethical
For example:
One suggestion that we would like to take great care to address is the request that we perform experiments on animals in order to [validate/verify/replicate] our findings. We do not find this request to be scientifically or ethically justified for the following reasons.
There are legal and regulatory mandates to reduce and replace animal use where possible.
[For researchers in the US:] In the U.S., the Animal Welfare Act requires that investigators consider alternatives to procedures that may cause more than momentary or slight pain or distress to the animals and the U.S. Government Principles for Utilization and Care of Vertebrate Animals Used in Testing, Research, and Training endorses consideration of nonanimal alternatives to reduce or replace the use of animals.
[For researchers in the EU:] In the EU, Directive 2010/63/EU states: “wherever possible, a scientifically satisfactory method or testing strategy, not entailing the use of live animals, shall be used instead of a procedure,” and: “The use of animals for scientific or educational purposes should therefore only be considered where a non-animal alternative is unavailable”.
[For researchers in the UK:] The Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 stipulates that “wherever possible, a scientifically satisfactory method or testing strategy not entailing the use of protected animals must be used instead of a regulated procedure”.
[For researchers in Canada:] According to the Canadian Council on Animal Care, “the use of animals in research, teaching, and testing is acceptable only if it promises to contribute to understanding of fundamental biological principles, or to the development of knowledge that can reasonably be expected to benefit humans or animals”.
In the light of [this principle/these principles], we do not believe that the use of animals would be necessary nor ethical in this instance.
Importantly, experiments on animals would not lend scientific credibility to our findings. Broadly speaking, the translatability of experiments on animals to findings in humans is much lower than was previously thought. Fundamental differences in physiology and genetics among species, critical disparities between human disease and the animal models created to study them, inherent effects of inbreeding and life in a laboratory, and the inability of animals to mimic human life histories and comorbidities severely limits the applicability of experiments on animals to the human-relevant questions we sought to answer. Specifically, [add information about poor translatability of animal models in the focus area of the study; check our Reference Library for potentially useful studies].
Animal methods bias, the preference for animal-based methods or lack of expertise to adequately evaluate nonanimal methods, is increasingly being recognized as a problem in publishing. The consequences of animal methods bias may include the unnecessary use of animals in scientific procedures, delays in publication, delays in the acceptance of nonanimal methods, the proliferation of less-translatable animal models, and “a misattribution of success in biomedical advances due to the use of animal-based experiments, despite the foundational work being done in nonanimal human-specific experimental systems.”
For these reasons, we respectfully decline the reviewer’s request to perform experiments on animals and hope that the editors will agree with this decision.