Help:Editors

The Scholarpedia 2 system

In October 2011 a major upgrade of Scholarpedia (SP2) has been launched. Below we discuss some of the main features, together with their implications for editors.

• A new work-flow for article publication has been introduced, in parallel to the usual one based on editors' invitation. Any registered user can spontaneously propose to author any new article. The candidate article-author combination is accepted if a Curator (or an editor) agrees to act as its Sponsor. In doing so, the Curator certifies the appropriateness of the topic and the expertise of the authors. To automatize and speed-up the process after sponsorship the self-proposed authors have by default two months to write the article, to find two reviewers (one should be the original sponsor), and to get their approval.

• To Sponsor his article, the candidate author generates a special URL from the article page and emails it (via a private email) to an existing curator of Scholarpedia. The secret sponsorship URL looks like:

 http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Special:SponsorArticle/2b3a445d1ef9e4e3435c67a2b84b36bd

The sponsor has to follow the URL and press 'agree' button. The secret URL allows the sponsors to verify the emails of the candidate authors (to verify their identity) and to delete the article completely if the candidate authors are not the top experts.

• Article authors themselves can invite reviewers by generating an "approval/rejection secret URL" on their article page, and by sending it to the reviewers via their private emails. An approval/rejection URL

looks like:

 http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Special:ReviewArticle/2b3a445d1ef9e4e3435c67a2b84b36bd

• The reviewers can provide their judgment by following the corresponding approval/rejection secret URL with their browser. Only registered Curators (or editors) may approve an article. This approval action triggers the automatic addition to the article of a line explicitly mentioning the name of the reviewer. On the other hand, anybody in possession of the secret URL (even not a Scholarpedia user) may anonymously reject the article. Thus, for the first time since 2006, articles in Scholarpedia can be rejected.

• For an article to be completely approved, two existing Curators (one of which must be an original Sponsor of the article) must publicly approve it. Any rejection immediately reverts the article to pre-sponsorship status. The article is rejected implicitly if it is not fully approved before the article's deadline. Rejection is anonymous, while approval is not: sponsors and curators approving an article are listed at the bottom of the article, so that their reputation validates the authority of the authors and the content of the article on the date it was approved.

• After reviewer approval the article enters a 14 day cool-off period during which editor rejection is still possible.

• The senior author of the article becomes its curator.

• After the cool-off period, if the article has not been rejected, the curator is allowed to approve an official revision of the article, and the article is deemed to be published.

For other features (including the post-publication life of an article under the responsibility of its Curator) see Help:Frequently_Asked_Questions.

As might be evident, the goal of these modifications is to add a "bottom-up" recruitment process for expert recruitment and peer-review, in addition to the "top-down" Editor-managed mechanism that already exists. The goal is to provide a way for younger researchers to seek out expert co-authors (as they will not be able to get sponsored on their own), and to speed-up the publication process, while preserving article and expert quality. This is done by having our existing base of trusted Curators publicly vouch for each article's quality and the authority of each article's expert.

Editorial charges in SP2

In SP2 as in SP1 the role of editors in finding good authors and in supervising the quality of the authors/articles is vital.

In the usual editor-mediated work-flow,

1. the Editor invites an author. See Section #Authorship.
2. at the completion of the article, the Editor invites reviewers. See Section #Reviewers.

In addition to this work-flow, editors in SP2 have the responsibility of monitoring the publication of articles originated by spontaneous candidatures, see Section #Monitoring.

Authorship

Figure 1: The submit for peer review button in the gray box on the top right of each unpublished article, as seen by logged-in authors or editors

Editors can create an account and reserve an article for an expert via the invite user link on the bottom of the left menu bar, which redirects to an invitation form. By doing so, editors can select an arbitrary deadline for the expert; we advise editors to avoid deadlines longer than 1 year.

Alternatively, experts are also free to propose themselves as candidate authors and find a Curator/Editor to act as an article Sponsor. To get his/her article sponsored, the Editor must go to the article page, click on the button request sponsorship (see Figure 1), obtaining the sponsorship secret URL for that article and follow the secret URL (or send the URL to another existing curator for sponsorship).

Reviewers

Figure 2: The submit for peer review button in the gray box on the top right of each unpublished article, as seen by logged-in authors or editors

Only curators/editors may approve an article, and to do that, they need the secret approval/rejection URL associated with the article. Anybody possessing the secret URL can reject the article. To be published an article must be approved by two curators/editors, one of which is a former article sponsor. A single rejection or lack of approval within the due time reverts the article to its pre-sponsoring state. Note that in SP1, there was no mechanism to reject an article; now, there is.

All editors can generate the secret approval/rejection URLs for any not-yet-published article by visiting the article page in Scholarpedia and clicking on the submit for peer-review button (see Figure 2).

At the completion of the article, the Editor invites reviewers. Some cases must be distinguished. The editor can check if the reviewer is already a user with Curator privileges by going to his/her user page.

Case A: The reviewer is not a Curator

• The Editor contact privately a reviewer and ask his/her advice
• The Editor goes to the article, obtains the secret URL of the article, and follows the link entering an advice in behalf of the reviewer.

Case A is advisable if the reviewer wants to reject the article or to approve it without being cited. Note the editor cannot approve twice an article: if needed an alternative Curator/Editor must be found (e.g. ask to the editor-in-chief at editor-in-chief@scholarpedia.org).

Case B: The reviewer is not a Curator

• The Editor privately contacts the reviewer and obtains his agreement to review
• To officially promote the reviewer to a Scholarpedia Curator, the Editor:

1. clicks the invite user link (bottom of the left menu)
2. fill in the user data form
3. leaves empty the article title entry (this is for proposing authors only)
4. checks the Add to curator usergroup checkbox
5. clicks create account button to send the invitation.

• The Editor goes to the article and obtains the secret approval/rejection URL.
• The Editor sends a private email to the reviewer with the secret URL, pinpointing that acceptance is not anonymous, but rejection of the article is.

Case B is appropriate if the reviewer is a good expert, deserving curatorship. The reviewer name will be listed in the article in case of approval.

Case C: The reviewer is a Curator

• The Editor goes to the article and obtains the the approval/rejection secret URL.
• The Editor sends a private email to the reviewer, asking him to review the article, giving him the secret URL, and pinpointing that the acceptance is not anonymous, but rejection of the article is. Below is a template for such an email

Dear Dr. NAME

I would highly appreciate your help in reviewing and (if appropriate) accepting the following article in Scholarpedia:
URL_OF_THE_ARTICLE
For this, you need to login to your Scholarpedia account and follow this confidential URL
SECRETE_REVIEWER_URL

Please, remember that the peer-review process in Scholarpedia is semi-anonymous. If you make any modification to the article or its talk page, your name will be visible to the public. If you accept the article, your name will appear at the bottom of the article validating the authority of the authors and the validity of the content on the day you accepted it. However, if you decide to reject the article (via the secret URL above), the server will not show your name. In fact, you do not even need to login to Scholarpedia to reject the article.

As the server will not send you any reminders, please let me know whether you could review this article within a week.

Yours,
YOUR NAME HERE
Editor of Scholarpedia - the peer-reviewed open access encyclopedia.

Monitoring

Editors also play a vital role in monitoring the independently-proposed candidate articles and authors. At any point, from sponsorship of an article to the end of the cool-off period, editors can generate approval/rejection URLs and solicit the advice of external experts. In extreme cases they can themselves use the approval/rejection URL to anonymously reject a poor article.

SP2 upgrade: already existing articles in your category

You do not need to do anything for all the articles in your category that have been approved and published.

Send occasional reminders to those authors whom you invited and who agreed to write an article but did not start yet. Tell these authors that they have the freedom to select their own reviewers or you can select reviewers for them (you will need to send your reviewers the secret URL generated by the server when you access the article).

Articles already submitted to peer-review will continue to require your involvement: Since the review process is no longer anonymous, all previous reviewer comments were anonymized and the server no longer stores the names of reviewers (except when the reviewers agreed to remove anonymity) . You need to restart the reviewer invitation process as explained in Section #Reviewers.

Obsolete features of SP1

• In SP1, editors were restricted to acting within a particular category -- now Editors can act on all unpublished articles, irrespective of category.
• It is no longer possible for editors to log-in as a different user (contact the Editor-in-Chief if you believe this will be required for any reason).
• It is no longer possible for editors to (modify and) approve published articles and have modifications displayed without the (implicit or explicit) approval.
• At the moment it is not possible for editors to modify an existing unpublished page with authors; this restriction will be lifted soon.

Getting started (for new editors)

Categories

Each article in Scholarpedia belongs to one or more categories (i.e., major topics), which are listed at the bottom of the article. For example, the article "Bursting" belongs to categories "Neuroscience", "Computational Neuroscience", and "Dynamical Systems" because its wikitext contains

[[Category:Neuroscience]], [[Category:Computational Neuroscience]], [[Category:Dynamical Systems]]

(at the bottom).

When you were invited to become an Editor of Scholarpedia, you were assigned a particular category.

Consult with the editor-in-chief on what articles should and should not be in your category. Look for existing articles in Scholarpedia that are pertinent to your category and add them to your category by adding the line [[Category:your category name]] at the end.

Greet existing authors in your category

Remind the editor-in-chief of Scholarpedia to send a letter to all authors of articles in your category to let them know that they have a new editor. It is a good idea to put some information into your userpage in Scholarpedia, including your photo, so that the authors can get to know you better. To edit your userpage, click your username at the top-right corner.

Choose a good title

First, you need to partition your field into (ideally) non-overlapping topics. Each topic must have a brief and descriptive title (e.g., "Brain", "Neuron", "Hippocampus"). Scholarpedia has an autolinker option that creates automatic links between articles. For example, every article containing the word "neuron" has an automatic link to the article "Neuron".

Then, you need to verify that the topics do not exist or were not reserved in Scholarpedia. Type the topic name in the search window and search existing articles. Watch out for synonyms like "Neural oscillators" vs. "Neuronal oscillators" vs. "Neuronal oscillator". You do not want to invite an author for an article just to learn a few months later that essentially the same article with a similar title had been written by somebody else.

You can also create additional titles, synonyms (e.g., 'neurone', 'neurons', 'neural', 'neuronal'), and redirect them to the main title "Neuron", so that mentioning any of these words would result in the automatic link to "Neuron". For example, to redirect 'Neurone' to "Neuron", create a new article "Neurone" with only one line of text:

#redirect[[Neuron]]

Choose the author

The 13th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has the "Space-Time" entry written by Albert Einstein and the "Psychoanalysis" entry written by Sigmund Freud. If Britannica had the feature of curatorship, physicists and psychologists of today would be fighting each other for the honor to be curators of these articles. It does not matter whether the original articles were good or bad; what matters is that they were written by Einstein and Freud.

The goal of Scholarpedia is to invite today's Einsteins and Freuds to write entries on their major discoveries so that future generation of experts would be willing to maintain these articles via the process of curatorship. The Editor-in-Chief has spent quite a substantial amount of his time creating the initial seed of legendary participants of Scholarpedia. Your goal as an Editor is to maintain such an elite group of participants.

Thus, if an entry describes a result or a phenomenon and the person who discovered the phenomenon is still alive, start with that person regardless of his/her age. Be bold and ambitious.

If the original author is not available, invite the person who has made the most fundamental contribution to the topic. Contact existing authors and other experts in the field and ask them to suggest the names. If all of them focus on the same individual, then invite this individual. Start your invitation letter with something like "A. Einstein, N. Bohr, and M. Planck suggested that you would be the best expert to invite to write a short entry ..." (change the names to whoever your advisers are provided that the invitee knows these advisers).

Remember that the goal of Scholarpedia is not to fill in all the articles as quickly as possible, but to get to the original inventors/discoverers. This is why the invitation process is slow, involving research and communication with other experts.

Quite often the best person for an article is a senior or retired scientist who has limit access to Internet and limited knowledge of wiki-technology or who is no longer active in the field. In this case, you need to arrange for a co-author for that person who is actively engaged in the field. This worked well for Otto Rossler (Rossler Attractor), Richard FitzHugh (FitzHugh-Nagumo Model), Richard Plant (Plant Model), and many other legendary experts.

Maintain your category page

Your category page should contain a short summary paragraph and the alphabetical list of all articles, see, e.g., Category:Computational Neuroscience or Category:Algorithmic Information Theory. The list is compiled automatically as new articles appear, but the summary paragraph must be written by you. Just go to your category page, press 'edit this article' button, write the text, then press 'save page' button.

"Encyclopedia of" pages

For advertisement's sake editors may be invited to act as authors of an "encyclopedia of" page, in which they must manually write a list of the published articles, and other information relevant for the category. The main difference with the category pages is the fact that encyclopedia of pages are manually maintained. See e.g. Encyclopedia_of_Physics.

How tos

Ask for help

Send an email to help@scholarpedia.org detailing your problem.

Update a deadline for an article

Figure 3: The "update" link in the gray box on the top right of each unpublished article, as seen by editors

Figure 4: the "update deadline" form

An editor can update the deadline for an article by logging in, going to the article page, clicking on the update link in the gray box on the top right of each unpublished article (see Figure 3), by choosing a new deadline in the "update deadline" form and by clicking on the Update deadline button (see Figure 4).