Scholars and scientists today are urged to build online identities, to promote their work on social media, and to track its impact via altmetrics. So too is academic writing seen as a social location, or a place for interaction on work at its different stages (as in "versioning," or the public composition of an article or book). Indeed, new projects for the design of innovative digital publishing formats, including those sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, are promoting such a social, collaborative, or participatory approach to complement the introduction of multi-media into scholarly monographs. But not all scholars and scientists, however much they welcome open access publishing and opportunities for networking, are enthusiastic about social scholarship. Some favor the durability of traditional academic habits and others note the limits of interest, particularly in science, for online conversation about research across many platforms. And there is anxiety too about the role of social media in faculty evaluation. This session will offer first an account of competing positions on social scholarship, aimed at helping participants see different views of our digital situation and future. Participants will then be invited to consider the extent to which scholarship can be fruitfully social, and the meanings of social scholarship for academic libraries, in these and other activities: designing and managing institutional repositories, guiding the faculty in the uses of bibliographic management software and altmetrics, evaluating emerging e-publishing initiatives featuring their social dimensions, and exploring prospects for library publishing itself.
