PLOS Science Wednesday: Hi Reddit we’re Lenny Teytelman and Hilda Bastian, and we're here to answer your questions about open access publishing and new tools and methods to facilitate collaboration between researchers -- Ask Us Anything!

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Hi Reddit,

My name is Lenny Teytelman and I am the CEO and co-founder of protocols.io. I am obsessed with creating a central open access place where scientists can share and discover up-to-date research methods. This is because I spent a year and a half as a postdoctoral researcher, discovering that a single step of the method that I was using was incorrect. Instead of a microliter, I needed 5, and instead of a 15-minute incubation, needed a hour. Because this was a correction of a previously-published technique and not a new method, there was no way for me to communicate this knowledge to anyone else using the same protocol.

We recently published a community resource paper in PLOS Biology, describing our solution to the above problem Protocols.io: Virtual Communities for Protocol Development and Discussion. We are working to improve science publishing and reproducibility of research by encouraging scientists to share the full details of their methods upon publication and by enabling them to keep these methods up-to-date, long after the papers are published.

And my name is Hilda Bastian, and I’m a scientist and editor working at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) (participating here in a personal capacity: the views expressed are my own). I’ve written a blog post at PLOS for 2016 Open Access Week on opening science to the community: Between Science's Secretive, Elitist Past and Open, Accessible Future.

My hobbies are cartooning and blogging about science, statistics, science publishing, and diversity. I’m a PLOS blogger, academic editor of PLOS Medicine, and member of PLOS ONE’s advisory group on human ethics.

In my day job, I work to make research on the effectiveness of health care accessible and understandable at PubMed Health, and support PubMed Commons, the commenting system for authors in PubMed. I’m working towards a PhD in medical science, with an interest in systematic reviews and meta-analysis – the processes for finding and analyzing bodies of research and keeping up with a changing knowledge base. The final stage is studying the processes for correcting errors after papers are published, and what effect that has on the reliability of biomedical research.

I started out as a community activist and citizen scientist in the late 1980s in Australia, when the biomedical literature was almost completely locked away from the community in libraries. I was mostly concerned with making clinical and public decisions more science-based – and making biomedical research more relevant to the needs of patients and consumers. Then making scientific literature accessible became a major passion for me: not just available without charge to people who want to use it, but understandable and usable, too. I believe elitism and restricted access to doing and using science is science’s past, and our future is open, collaborative, and participatory. And I believe many of the skills of science are valuable for everyone.

Follow Hilda on Twitter @hildabast. She's also Wikipedia User:Hildabast.

Follow Lenny on Twitter @lteytelman.

Hilda’s blog on Open Science

We'll be answering you questions at 1pm ET -- Ask Us Anything!

">PLOS Science Wednesday: Hi Reddit we’re Lenny Teytelman and Hilda Bastian, and we're here to answer your questions about open access publishing and new tools and methods to facilitate collaboration between researchers -- Ask Us Anything!