Hi Reddit – We are responsible for open access programs at the American Chemical Society, where our mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and its people. American Chemical Society (ACS) is the world’s largest scientific society and one of the world’s leading sources of authoritative scientific information. In the past 2 years, we’ve expanded our open access outreach, launching several new programs and journals, including: ACS Central Science (pubs.acs.org/centralscience) – the ACS’ first fully open access journal – publishing the most exciting and impactful scientific research that highlights the centrality of chemistry – free to read AND free to publish! ACS Author Rewards (pubs.acs.org/authorrewards) – a stimulus program worth as much as $60M in credits to be used by ACS authors over the next 2 years to help purchase of open access options; ACS AuthorChoice (pubs.acs.org/authorchoice) –ACS provides various licenses to help authors choose the best option for their needs, along with significant discounts for ACS members and authors at institutions that subscribe to ACS’ All Publications package. ACS Editors’ Choice (pubs.acs.org/editorschoice) – A popular program in which ACS journal editors recommend articles that should be made open access, and ACS sponsors one new article into open access every day of the year. ACS Omega (pubs.acs.org/acsomega) – ACS’ second fully open access journal, coming soon, is aimed at publishing technically sound research with a focus on expedited editorial decision making. Darla Henderson, PhD: I am the Assistant Director of Open Access Programs at ACS Publications, and joined ACS in 2008 after a decade with John Wiley & Sons. I have a PhD in chemistry from Duke University. Kevin Davies, PhD: I am the VP of Business Development at ACS Publications and Publisher of C&EN; and also the author of three popular science books, most recently “The $1,000 Genome.” I studied at Oxford and London University, where I took a PhD in molecular genetics. We’ll be back at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything! We’re live and ready to answer your questions (1 pm EST)! /dh Thank you Reddit AMA community - the last hour was fun, and we appreciate your enthusiasm and participation! Signing off for now - DH, KD

Hi Reddit, We are: Chemistry World Deputy editor Dr Philip Robinson MRSC, News editor Patrick Walter AMRSC Comment editor Chris Chapman MRSC ARPharmS. We are all journalists with a background in science, and are happy to talk about anything related to science journalism – from how we pick which stories to cover through to how we share them with our readers. We can also recommend the best science books out there, or give you our personal insight into science politics and research trends. Here is a link to our feature article on content curation online, discussing the /r/science moderator community and why chemists should get involved. Edit: Thanks for all your questions! We’re heading off now. We hope you found this interesting and useful.

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Hi Reddit, My name is Malcolm Macleod and I am Professor of Neurology and Translational Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh. I’m interested in risks of bias in animal research, and how these might get in the way of the development of new drugs. And my name is David Howells and I am Professor of Neuroscience and Brain Plasticity at the University of Tasmania. My research on stroke focuses on how we translate good ideas into solid bench science that might then survive the rigor of clinical trialing to provide treatments for brain diseases. We recently published a study titled “Risks of bias in reports of in vivo research: A focus for improvement” in PLOS Biology. This study extends work across multiple neuroscience domains which highlights the risk of overestimation of the potential for translational success when studies fail to take measures to reduce the impact of bias. This study investigated whether this held true across a broader range of science and whether where the work was conducted or published influenced the risk of bias. We already know that publications which do not describe certain design features which reduce the risk of bias (e.g. randomization, blinding) tend to exaggerate observed effects, at least in the neurosciences. We were interested to see whether this was the case more generally, and if this was different in journals with a high impact factor or in work from leading institutions. We found that nobody is doing particularly well but also that work from leading institutions or published in high impact factor journals was at greater than average risk of bias. We hope that scientists, institutions, journals, and funders will use these findings to help improve the process of drug discovery and development. We will be answering your questions at 1pm EST (10am PST and 5am on 1/14/16 in Melbourne). Ask Us Anything! You can follow Malcolm on Twitter @maclomaclee, and @CAMARADES_

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Hi Reddit. My name is Sumeet Vadera and I am Director of Epilepsy Surgery at University of California, Irvine. I did my Neurosurgery and Epilepsy Surgery training at the Cleveland Clinic. Here is a link to my profile page http://www.ucirvinehealth.org/find-a-doctor/v/sumeet-vadera/. Here are some aspects of my career that might be interesting to the Reddit community - 1) As an epilepsy surgeon, we have a variety of surgeries that we perform that can be broken down into diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Diagnostic procedures require implanting electrodes within the brain to localize where the seizures are coming from. I have written several papers that have to do with this technique http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=vadera+s. I also have a neurosurgical robot at UCI that helps me perform these surgeries and they recently wrote about the robot and our surgeries in the OC Register http://www.ocregister.com/articles/brain-650683-device-surgery.html Therapeutic procedures are performed after we know where the seizures are coming from and these include resections (temporal lobectomy, hemispherectomy, etc) and implantation of neurostimulators. 2) I wrote a paper that was published last month in Journal of Surgical Education looking at “National Incidence of Medication Error in Surgical Patients Before and After Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Duty-Hour Reform.” This is something that has never been looked at before and has some really interesting results. We showed that since the 80 hour Duty Restriction for resident training, there has been a spike in medication errors within teaching hospitals. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26089160 3) We use high tech tools to treat patients with epilepsy. I have robots, lasers and neurostimulator devices that assist me in treating patients who have epilepsy that fails medications. I’ll be back at 3 pm EST (12 pm PST, 9 pm UTC) to answer Ask me anything about about epilepsy surgery, neurosurgery in general, or residency training. EDIT1: Finished my case early today, I’m here to answer questions now. EDIT2: Dr Jack Lin, Director of Epilepsy Neurology at UCI has joined me to answer questions related to the neurology side of epilepsy surgery. EDIT3: Thank you for all the great questions, I hope this was helpful for everyone. I will check tonight if there are any more questions so keep them coming. Feel free to email me at [email protected]. We also are doing some exciting research at UCI and we are always looking for good people to get involved. Feel free to contact me about that as well.

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Hi Reddit! We are CANN, a subdivision of the ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety. Within the last year we have petitioned from initial formation, to committee, to our current subdivision status. We believe that with the exponential growth of the legal cannabis industry, offering a scientific community of professionals, researchers, and academics will improve safety standards and industry practices. A part of the American Chemical Society, we at CANN use our resources to develop workshops, training sessions, symposium and general sessions on cannabis health and safety-related topics at national, regional and other meetings of the American Chemical Society. We aim to support future chemists with training, mentoring programs, research opportunities, and other resources. Today our group is open for discussion to help educate a broader audience. Thank you all for your participation and for the CANN volunteers that fielded questions. We received more than 820 questions and more than 3000 upvotes. We hope that we were able to shed some light on this popular topic and that you will reach out to us again if we can be of any assistance. We would also like to encourage membership and volunteerism as there is always lots to do. Email us at [email protected]. Thanks to Ezra Pryor, Jahan Marcu, Ph.D., Erika Oltermann, Melissa Wilcox, Guillermo Moreno, Christopher Hudalla, PhD and Jeff Raber, PhD for answering questions.

Hi Reddit! I’m Eric Caine and I study risk factors for suicide and ways to prevent suicide. With colleagues in Rochester and from around the world, I’ve investigated many factors that contribute to suicide, with a recent focus on links to unemployment, the choice of specific methods, and the burdens of suicide and attempted suicide involving youth and adults in the middle years of life (20s-60s). The ICRC-S is devoted to developing community-based public health approaches to help people change their life trajectories so that they don’t become suicidal, or if they do, so that they can reach out for help or accept it when offered. These approaches complement methods that we use every day to treat people who have survived an attempt or seriously considered killing themselves. I participate in the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, which wrote the latest version of our national strategy to prevent suicide and also works with the CDC, states, and local organizations to reach out to vulnerable populations and individuals. Since 2001 I’ve led a series of collaborative initiatives in China that deal directly with suicide prevention, the delivery of mental health services in developing countries, and the potential for public health approaches to reduce injuries and prevent premature deaths. I’ll start answering questions at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 6 pm UTC), AMA!

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Hi! I’m Melody Bomgardner, Senior Business Editor for C&EN. I write about food and agriculture for the magazine, in addition to other topics like advanced biofuels and other environmentally-friendly technologies. Earlier this year I wrote an extensive cover story about plant-based protein sources [link “plant-based protein sources” to http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i6/Calling-Plants-Fulfill-Proteins-Promise.html] and got the idea to write about hemp. Before I began research for the hemp feature, I didn’t know very much about this crop, but I ended up learning much more than would fit in the story. I look forward to your questions. Hi, I’m Anndrea Hermann, M.Sc, B.GS, P.Ag., and I’m the President of Hemp Technologies, Sales and Business Development Officer of Hemp Production Services, Principle The Ridge International Cannabis Consulting and Founder/Host iHempRadio. I am the lead instructor of Oregon State University’s course on Industrial Hemp, as well as a Health Canada Authorized Hemp THC Sampler and Canadian Hemp Licensee who has advised Health Canada on a wide spectrum of Cannabis projects (from 2001 to the present). I am a current board member of the Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance, President Emeritus and current board of the National Hemp Industries Association and special committee member for the European Industrial Hemp Association. I have assisted with creating and reviewing hemp regulations in Canada, the European Union, South Africa, Uruguay, Australia, New Zealand, India, Vermont, Virginia, Tennessee, North Dakota, Missouri, Colorado, California, Oregon and Michigan, for example. These regulations govern the hemp industry. While state initiatives have legalized two main types of Cannabis, marijuana for medical or recreational uses has gotten a lot of attention lately while the effort to revive industrial hemp production in the U.S. is much less well known. This ancient crop traveled with the colonists to North America and was a staple of agricultural production in the U.S. up to the 1930s. Since then it has been largely illegal to grow hemp in the U.S., though it was legalized in Canada in 1998. Now, though, the 2014 Farm Bill allows some controlled plantings of hemp in any state that has an agriculture department willing to oversee production for research purposes. Many vegetarians and vegans know the hemp seed – called grain – is rich in essential amino acids and fatty acids. For more about the potential for a hemp resurgence in the U.S., check out: Hemp, No Longer Illegal, Is Poised For A Comeback In The U.S. [http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i46/Hemp-Longer-Illegal-Poised-Comeback.html] Update! I’m pleased to report that analytical chemist and hemp variety expert Jace Callaway will also be joining us today. We’ll be back at 11 am EST (8 am PST, 4 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything! Hey all - it’s now 12:07 and our official live hour is over. But I invite our experts to continue answering questions as they have time available. Please give a hemp-hearty thank you to Anndrea and Jace!

Hi Reddit! My name is Emily Petroff and I just finished my PhD at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. My research focuses on finding short, bright bursts of light with large radio telescopes like the Parkes telescope in Australia. I mainly study things called “Fast Radio Bursts” which only last a few milliseconds but release more energy than the Sun does in a day. These bursts seem to be coming from distant galaxies in stellar explosions or collisions of neutron stars but we still don’t know exactly what causes them. Last year, I led a team that discovered the first fast radio burst in real-time and used telescopes around the world to try to find out where it came from. Since then we’ve been learning more about these bursts and our team just published the discovery of 5 more from the past 6 years of data. Less than 20 of these bursts have ever been found, but more than 1,000 are happening every day throughout the Universe. We are hoping we will be able to use these bursts to learn about the extreme objects that caused them and the galaxies they live in. This year I also led a team that found that other curious signals in our data were actually coming from microwave ovens at the telescope site. We were able to show that these nearby signals don’t have anything to do with fast radio bursts but that local interference can show up in unexpected ways, especially with more and more electronics encroaching on sites for radio astronomy. Have questions about radio astronomy? Signals from space? Pulsars and neutron stars? I’ll be back at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, Ask me anything! UPDATE: Thank you to everyone for the questions so far; I’ve had a great time! I’ll be back later today to answer more questions!