Hi Reddit! This is Johna Leddy, president of The Electrochemical Society (ECS). I’m joined by Jeff Fergus, editor of the Society’s official meeting proceedings, ECS Transactions (ECST). Today we’d like to talk with you all about open science, our Free the Science initiative, and our new preprint server, ECSarXiv, built and hosted by the Center for Open Science’s Open Science Framework. We’ll be back at 12 noon ET to answer your questions, ask us anything! ECS Chief Content Officer & Publisher Mary E. Yess (username: ecspublisher) will also help to field questions. More about us: Dr. Johna Leddy: I’m an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Iowa, an alumna of Rice University and the University of Texas, and the current president of ECS. I’ve been an ECS member for over 25 years and have served on various committees within the organization. I’m also a former chair of ECS’s Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry Division. My research interests range from fundamental electrochemistry through voltammetric methodologies and modeling to the technology of power sources. A major focus for me has been examining magnetic effects on electron transfer processes. Dr. Jeff Fergus: I’m a professor of materials engineering and the associate dean for program assessment and graduate studies in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering at Auburn University. I’ve served as the editor of ECST, ECS’s official meeting proceedings, since 2013. I’ve also held positions on multiple committees within the organization and served as the chair of the ECS High Temperature Materials Division. My research interests are in materials for high temperature and electrochemical applications—particularly in understanding and mitigating performance degradation, such as chromium poisoning in SOFCs and capacity fading in Li-ion batteries. The Electrochemical Society (ECS): ECS is a nonprofit scientific society that has been publishing continuously since 1902. We’re an international membership organization that has over 8,000 members worldwide across more than 80 countries. Our mission is to disseminate and advance the science we steward through meetings and publications, and we believe the best way to do that is through transition to an open science paradigm. This mission is the driving force behind our Free the Science initiative: www.electrochem.org/free-the-science. We believe that by opening and democratizing research, we can enhance and accelerate the science that will ensure our survival and sustainability on this planet. We already give authors the opportunity to publish open access in our 2 peer-reviewed, hybrid open access journals—the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology. Currently, over a third of our journal articles are being published open access. The upcoming launch of ECSarXiv will mark a major step forward for Free the Science toward the complete open access model we plan to one day implement, allowing all authors to publish for free and removing the paywall for readers. We invite anyone who wants to know more about open science, Free the Science, preprint servers, or scholarly communications to ask questions here. For more info about us, check out our website at www.electrochem.org. Edit: Thanks, everyone, for the insightful questions and discussion. That’s all the time we have today. We had a great experience talking with you all—you raised a number of excellent points about the open science movement that we’ll want to keep in mind as we move forward. Until next time, please feel free to reach out to us with questions at [email protected].