This month, SoNYC, our monthly discussion series in NYC about all aspects of communicating and carrying out science online, turns one! We’re hosting a party on May 2nd to celebrate, and to warm up we’re taking a look back at all the SoNYC events from the past year.

SoNYC is co-organised by Lou Woodley of nature.com, John Timmer, Science Editor at Ars Technica and Jeanne Garbarino and Joe Bonner at Rockefeller University. We follow a rotating 3-month editorial cycle to ensure we cover all angles of science online:

In month 1 we cover topics relating to science communication and outreach. Month 2 focuses on online tools for scientists, including digital publishing and month 3 of the cycle looks a “implicational” issues such as legal and policy discussions.

In this post we round up all of the SoNYC events around online tools for scientists and digital publishing. You can read the recap of the events from the science communication and outreach strand here, and the implicational issues – legal, policy and community here.

Are scientists anti-social when it comes to adopting online tools for science?

On Monday the 16th May 2011 the second SoNYC took place. The sharing of information and materials is an integral part of the scientific process.  Many communities have found that online tools can greatly enhance this sort of sharing, but the scientific community appears to be lagging behind when it comes to the adoption of social software, even though scientists have embraced various digital tools as part of their regular workflow. The panel discussed the technical challenges of creating social media software for researchers, the difficulty of attracting a scientific audience and looked at why it’s so hard to get a group of scientists to agree on anything. The panel included:

• Jessica Mezel, Mendeley.  Mendeley is an online reference manager that allows researchers to share the documents they find useful and compelling with other interested scientists.
• James Hedges, NYU.  James is a research scientist at NYU. He’ll talk about why it’s so difficult to get a group of scientists to agree on any software,
• Arikia Millikan, Wired.com.  Arikia will discuss the difficulties of building a software business for scientists from a technological and financial perspective.
• Lou Woodley, nature.com.  Nature.com hosts a variety of platforms that help scientists and scientific communicators exchange ideas.

For more information, you can find a write up and Storify summary from the event here and below are a few of the take home messages from the online conversation:

Advanced ebooks and book apps

On Tuesday 20th September the fifth SoNYC took place at Rockefeller University in NYC. The topic for debate was “Enhanced eBooks & Book Apps: the Promise and Perils.” Enhanced ebooks and tablet apps offer new ways to present material and engage readers. Yet some of the software restrictions and rights deals that these ebooks, apps and their platforms use can make them unfriendly to librarians, archivists, and future users. The discussion focused on ways authors, designers, and publishers can best exploit these new opportunities while avoiding their current and potential downsides? The panel featured:

• David Dobbs, moderator (As well as an author, blogger, and ebook experimentalist).
• John Dupuis, science librarian at York University and blogger at Confessions of a Science Librarian.
• Evan Ratliff, co-founder and editor, The Atavist.
• Amanda Moon, senior editor, FSG/Scientific American Books.
• Carl Zimmer, author, journalist, and blogger.
• Dean Johnson, creative director of Brandwidth, developer of The Exoplanets, an iPad book/app to be published this fall by Scientific American Books/FSG.

For more information, you can find a write up and Storify summary from the event here and below are a few of the take home messages from the online conversation:

Thinking digital: giving your research more reach and making sure others can find it

On Wednesday 25th January 2012, we hosted the eighth installment of SoNYC. The topic for debate this month was, “Thinking Digital: Giving your research more reach (and making sure others can find it).” Only a fraction of the things that scientists do in the lab ever see the light of day in a formal publication. Negative data, new tools, and public data sources rarely merit an independent paper, making it tough to receive credit for your work. Even when the work leads to a paper, it can be tough to accurately credit everyone’s contributions, or make the underlying data available to the scientific community.

This month’s panel discussed new tools like Figshare, a repository for negative data, and the ORCID author identifier, which can be used to associate any form of digital publication to your research record. It also featured two librarians who discussed how research libraries can help store and share information. The panel featured:

• Mark Hahnel is the developer of Figshare.
• Carol Feltes is the head librarian at Rockefeller University.
• Veronique Kiermer is an Executive Editor and Head of Researcher Services at Nature, and a member of the ORCID steering committee.
• Cathy Norton is the library scholar at the Biodiversity Heritage Library at Woods Hole’s Marine Biological Laboratory.

For more information, you can find a write up and Storify summary from the event here and below are a few of the take home messages from the online conversation: