Scholarpedia:2.0
The ultimate goal of scholars and scientists is to advance human knowledge. We all understand that the free exchange of ideas is crucial to that enterprise. We have also known for over a decade now that the best way to disseminate research is to make it freely accessible online. But despite this, most of the results of our research still only appear in closed journals, and scientists and scholars who are normally happy to write and publish for free rarely contribute to the development of open resources like Wikipedia.
We joined Scholarpedia because we were convinced that scientists and scholars would relish the opportunity to publish in a free online encyclopedia, provided the encyclopedia respected each author's expertise, and contributions would be academically recognized. We believe that Scholarpedia, with its journal-style of publication and its exceptionally high profile authors, can lead to the flourishing of open-access, high quality, scholarly work. Currently, however, Scholarpedia has not been meeting its full potential.
Scholarpedia's original model was to grow from a base of strong authors through a process of elections, choosing the most qualified author through a vote. However, this process often stood in the way of enthusiastic authors and slowed participation. Authors were further slowed by the need to learn a new format or to wait for a volunteer to typeset the author’s work. Thus, in order to continue growing, Scholarpedia has relied on actively recruiting and retaining volunteer expert editors, and Scholarpedia's growth has been thanks almost entirely to their work.
While the editor-driven model has allowed Scholarpedia to grow steadily and engage top experts, it has become clear that the bottlenecks intrinsic to a volunteer "top-down" model have slowed Scholarpedia's expansion. Perhaps most crucially, rather than enabling user participation, this model has restricted and potentially even discouraged involvement. And by relying on a blind peer review process, progress has depended on each editor's (and reviewer's) schedule. Finally, the current curatorship model for already-published articles has not encouraged the community to help keep each topic current, and has sometimes imposed an unnecessary burden on authors to review even insignificant modifications to their articles.
We can and must overcome these hurdles. No other group's combination of web platform and scholarly expertise compares with the one we now have: Wikipedia is not a scholarly resource, and review journals will not soon transform themselves into free encyclopedias. We are the ones best able to transform Scholarpedia into a rich, timely, and accessible repository of authoritative scholarly knowledge.
To allow Scholarpedia to reach its potential we have performed a full redesign of how it looks and works. The goal has been to remove barriers to participation while maintaining rigorous peer review and the most qualified curators. In the redesign, Scholarpedia Editors retain their existing roles and responsibilities, but in addition users can propose articles independently. To do so, these users must solicit support from Scholarpedia's base of expert Curators, first to reserve the topic for themselves, and subsequently to publish it. This model allows scholars of all levels of experience to start new articles, and the expectation is that many articles will be started by junior scholars. The junior scholar would then recruit more senior ones to gain Curator support and ensure the contribution is authoritative. Further, once the author’s article is published, revisions to it might be approved either implicitly (by the community) or explicitly (by the article's Curator), allowing different levels of scrutiny for different kinds of revisions.
This redesign has been no small undertaking, and the site is still only in beta stage: there remain features to add and bugs to fix; the help documentation needs the contributions and insights of new users; as before, Scholarpedia remains a community-driven work-in-progress.
As a community endeavor, Scholarpedia stands in opposition to an Internet overtaken by "content farms" and websites filled with superficial, unscholarly, and untrustworthy information. It aims to render obsolete the expensive toll barriers that have disconnected the public from the research they have funded. This redesign is a unique opportunity to renew our effort to build the world's first open-access peer-reviewed encyclopedia. If you have been interested in participating, but have been unsure about when and how to help, now is your best chance. Any help page you write, article you revise, or question you pose can, at this early stage, have a major impact on the accessibility of scholarly information worldwide. And you are among the first to have an opportunity here to propose and co-author an article with a world-leading expert.
Peer-reviewed scholarship and fast wiki-based collaboration are two strong traditions that are not easily mixed. We have learned that changes will be required if we are to succeed in combining them. But a new website and interface will not be enough: more than anything, the development of a free and scholarly encyclopedia needs people like us to actually go out and build it.
Sincerely,
Dr. Eugene Izhikevich (editor-in-chief), Leo Trottier (associate editor), Abdellatif Nemri (associate editor), Tobias Denninger
- To see a preview of the new Scholarpedia, visit: http://beta.scholarpedia.org
- For details on how Scholarpedia is changing and to contribute to help page development: http://content.dev.scholarpedia.org
- A sandbox for playing with proposing new articles can be found at: http://sandbox.dev.scholarpedia.org
