Dear Peter and Bernhard, Please find below comments for the open charm paper v.5.1. Below I have some suggestions for arrangement of Figures and tables, but the situation can be changed after inserting the authour list, so I think it is time to put the complete authour list to the draft. You can contact Mike about it. --> done para 1: You mention that ratio of open charm to charmonium cross sections in pA reactions is essential for quark-gluon plasma searches and refer to [10], however I was not able to find this point there. Where should I look? I would also like to know what non-perturbative effects do you mean in the previous sentence. --> Good point. In this reference there is indeed a very short discussion, --> and only references are given to the original papers, e.g. Andronic --> Barun-Munzinger, Redlich, Stachel plb 571 2003 36. Bernhard was in --> contact with J. Stachel about it, and we changed this sentence --> and the reference. --> Non-perturbative effect: the k-factor still seems to be a free variable... At the end of introduction you mention that a comparison with theoretical expectations is made. However, I didn't find any mentioning of this comparison in Summary. Should we add it? In the paper, I found only Pv calculated assuming isospin invariance (but here it is just assumed, but again no comparison is made). --> The theoretical predictions actually heavily rely on experimental --> input (e.g., k-factor for absolute values), and in case of Pv --> the use of isospin invariance cannot really be considered as a model. --> I propose we drop that sentence in the introduction. Section 3.1, end of para 3: put additional spaces in the definition of zeta between three "p(...)". --> Definition of zeta removed, we do not actually need it. Table 2 looks a little bit non-structured and easy to read. I would suggest to add vertical spaces between 4 parts of it (possibly "\vfill" will work, otherwise one can add something like "\vspace*{4ex}"). Another possibility is to use \begin{table*} instead of "\begin{table}" for a table which occupies two columns (example is in our psi' paper hep-ex/0607046). --> We have tried with a second option. Please have a look at it. In the current layout, I would propose to put Table 3 after Fig.2. First of all, Table 3 is discussed after Figs.2-4, and secondly, then Figs.2-4 could look like a complete block. --> done p.6, col 1, middle of para 2 - Thank you for introducing this well-hidden error in the middle of text. This will certainly test how many people read the whole paper. After testing this, please finish the sentence. --> found by almost all who sent comments; a % sneeked in... end of p.6, col 1 and further: I would add brackets to references of equations: "Eq.(4)" I would add dots to the end of Eq.(5,7,8,10) --> dots: done --> brackets: we do not use it in the phi/K* paper. I left it as it was for --> the time being. p.6, col 2, the last but 2nd para: "Tables 4 and Tables 5" --> "Tables 4-5" p.6, col 2, the last para: "tables 6-8" --> "Tables 6-8" --> done End of p.6, col.1: You sum three f(D) from PDG page 200 to get (89.1+-4.1)% and probably ignore statistical correlations between them. LEP compilation paper hep-ex/0412015 in Appendix B shows that there are correlations. How much the statistical error 4.1% will reduce if correlations are taken into account? (I already asked this question, is there any answer to it? Probably, statistical uncertainties from HERA-B cross sections anyway dominate, so that influence of correlations is probably small, but still we specify this number in the paper, so it should be correct.) --> We assume the fractions are independent. The error is only a small --> fraction of the total systematic and thus the details should not --> matter much for our result. We should, however, tell the reader --> what we did, and I have added this in the text. --> In case you have an idea how to improve the error estimate, we --> would of course appreciate your help! End of Sect.5.1: probably we could show a plot of ccbar cross section vs. sqrt(s) similar to Fig.1 of recent paper by C.Merino, C.Pajares and Yu.M.Shabelsky arXiv:0707.0946 [hep-ph] (or corresponding plots of review [1]). This would be another comparison with the theory. --> I do not think this result is of central importance for this paper --> to merit a special figure to compare with the others. --> First it relies on the assumption taht we can use e+e- hadronization --> data, and second neglects correlations. Sect 5.1, last line: "adding in quadrature the individual contributions" --> "adding the individual contributions in quadrature" --> I think both are OK, and would prefer to keep the original version. p.8, col 1, para 2: In principle one could expect that chi2/ndf should not change much if the number of ndf is large and the change of chi2 is small as here (I would expect increase by (delta(beta)/sigma(beta))2 = (1/4.3)2 = 0.05). However, giving the second chi2/ndf at the end of paragraph tempts to compare the two numbers and adds possibly nothing, so one could exclude it. --> right, the second chi2 removed from the text Sect.5.2, last line: I would not consider that 3.2 is much larger than 1.4, so I would propose to change "much larger" to "larger". --> done p.8, col 2, last line: what is the last prediction of Pythia for ratio sigma(D+)/sigma(D0)? --> 0.41 for Pythia version 6.326 with default settings except for --> PARP(91)=1.5 and PARJ(13)=0.6 (private communication, Lourenco+Woehri) p.9, col 1, para 2: "([1]" --> "(see review [1]" --> done sect.5.3, last para: one can compare the result also with recent Zeus paper "Measurement of D mesons production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA", ZEUS Collaboration (S. Chekanov et al.), DESY-07-052, arXiv:0704.3562 [hep-ex], Section 8.2. As far as I understand, their gamma(s) should be divided by 2 to get 0.112 + 0.015 + 0.009 + 0.017 = sigma(D+s)/(sigma(D0)+sigma(D+)) - 0.004 - 0.013 --> added Table 9: the table should look better after transposing it (and occupy less space). --> done Sect.5.4, middle: "the second systematic" --> "the second is systematic" --> I think we do not have to duplicate 'is' in this case. Sect.5.4: Can any statement be made about comparison with theory? e.g. some values from Lourenco? --> I think we should avoid making too many comparisons with theory --> (=Pythia) because the values depend very much on the version and --> settings. Summary, para 2, line 2: "were measure" --> "were measured" line 5: "cross section are" --> "cross sections are" last line in col.1: "with existing measurements" --> "with the existing measurements" --> done Summary, col 1: "in most cases the most..." "in the majority of case the most..." --> done References: a comprehensive list of corrections in punctuation was already provided by Dima. I can add the following: [2] Put spaces in the name of the journal. [29] Other references have a dot at the end, except this one. --> done In general, I would advise to look how References are made in a recent published paper, e.g. our psi' paper Eur. Phys. J. C 49, 545-558 (2007) and use this style. One can notice that they put the year in brackets at the end of reference. They don't put a dot at the end of reference. --> done