Academic blogging consequences for Open Science: a first insight into their potential impact.

Social media have been analysed in different studies and from different perspectives, and the findings show that they can constitute new forms of impact indicators of scientific activities, intended at large and not limited to the publication. Therefore, new forms of research evaluation are emerging as alternative to the traditional citation-based metrics. Initially based on web links or download numbers (webometrics) the new evaluation methods have evolved into alternative metrics, or "altmetrics", based on the set of activities covered by social media services. In view of the above, the paper concentrates on academic blogging as a form of scholarly communication in the Open Science context, and on the disciplinary areas of the Humanities and Social Science as privileged domain to be investigated. The OpenEdition initiative is analysed as a complete infrastructure for the digital resources for the Humanities and Social Sciences and as a concrete exemplification of quality filters applied to these (relatively) new media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]