By Edward Nawotka

In today’s feature story about the Association of Learned and Professional Scholarly Publishers (ALPSP) conference, one of the “disruptive” factors in scholarly publishing has been the introduction of social networking.

Kaitlin Thaney of Digital Science offered a presentation on the “social” side of digital science — see slide deck here — which includes everything from online discovery, to data capture and organization.

One of the takeaways from the talk is that “scientific contribution has moved beyond just the paper” and “must be noted in the metrics.”

See some of the new outputs in the image on the right.

Social media can change the overall perception of these inputs and outputs.

On balance the change social media has brought to scholarly publishing looks like evolution. But is there a downside? Let us know what you think in the comments below.