Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your thoughtful review of our paper.  We've done our best to incorporate changes to address all of your comments in the newest draft of the paper.  Please find below responses item-by-item, marked with ---> .

Cheers,
The authors

Reviewer #1: 
Manuscript Summary: 
The Manuscript outlines a technique for utilising Simplified Models in setting limits on searches for Supersymmetry at the Large Hadron Collider experiments.
Such a technique could find a wide range of use cases and may therefore prove to be a highly cited work of importance to this area of experimental particle physics.
Simplified Models are a widely used technique to avoid bias in optimising searches based on a single signal topology and recasting such limits into a broader range
of Supersymmetry signals is crucial to guide the phenomenology community. The most highly constraining and high-profile LHC supersymmetry searches have been 
used as examples demonstrating the authors knowledge of the key aspects of their work. 

Major Concerns:
I have no major concerns with the publication of this work.

Minor Concerns:
Some of the type-setting on the draft received is a little odd, with values appearing in the body of the text that require roman symbols having large amounts of space around them. These are too numerous to point out individually but the reviewer assumes the journal and authors are happy with the solution they will come to.

---> We agree - this is an unfortunate feature of Microsoft Word, it seems, which latex handles much better (that is why the reviewer presumably is objecting)

line 41: "is" -> "are"

---> Done (sorry)

line 86, 87: What is done if the information about correlations of uncertainties is not available?

---> The signal region or analysis with the best expected limit is used.  Amended the text.

line 97: The results are considered to be "sufficiently close". What does this mean numerically? 

---> Within about 25%.  The production cross-section is steeply falling, so this results in limits that are close to those of the experiments.  Amended the text to note this.

Are there any areas where the results may not be valid. Could the authors comment further on specifics of where PGS may not be a good simulator of the ATLAS/CMS detector (perhaps with tau leptons, photons or b jets?) and what should be done in such circumstances.

---> The most significant problem is the tau fake rate.  The real efficiencies are close enough, and b-tagging is straightforward to emulate when the working point is given.  We have added a note on these issues.

line 144: MSSMCalc. The reference points to the same reference as for MadGraph. I'm not familiar with this calculator, does it come as standard with MG perhaps?

---> It does indeed.

Additional Comments to Authors:
Is it possible to add a comment on the approach the authors would take to extracting a simplified model exclusion from analysis using multi-parameter fits to define their exclusion limits.

---> In our view, the manner of presentation of these limits is under considerable flux in the field.  It remains to be seen whether experiments will shortly begin providing workspaces to theorists, or whether they will in fact supply more cut-and-count type signal region analyses for purposes like those described in this paper.  We therefore wish to avoid any speculation that might go too far in anticipating the outcome of these developments.