Scholarpedia:Editor

Call for Nomination of Editors

Scholarpedia is the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia written by Scholars from around the world. It combined the philosophies of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia.

The 13th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has "Space-Time" entry written by A. Einstein and "Psychoanalysis" entry written by Z. Freud. If Britannica had the Scholarpedia's feature of curatorship, physicists and psychologists of today would be fighting each other for the honor to be curators of these articles. 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 wiki-style process of curatorship.

At present, Scholarpedia hosts Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence, and Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems. Most articles in these encyclopedias have already been reserved (and many have been written) by the original inventors/authors of the topics. For example, T. Kohonen wrote "Kohonen Network", J. Hopfield wrote "Hopfield Network", R. FitzHugh wrote "FitzHugh-Nagumo Model", Ya. Sinai wrote "Kolmogorov-Sinai Entropy", L. Zadeh wrote "Fuzzy Logic", and so on.

Within a year, the three encyclopedias will be used as seeds to start Encyclopedia of Cognitive Neuroscience, and then of Neuroscience, Encyclopedia of Computer Science, Encyclopedia of Mathematical Biology, and then of Applied Mathematics. Subsequently, all these encyclopedias will merge to Encyclopedia of Biology, of Engineering, of Physics, and of Mathematics.

To achieve this ambitious goal, Scholarpedia establishes a new privilege - "Editor" (in addition to "Scholar" and "Curator"). Editorial responsibilities, explained in Editorial Help, include

• identifying and inviting the original inventors/authors/discoverers for the corresponding topics,
• initiating election of authors when the original author is no longer alive or when many people made comparable contribution,
• communicating with the authors and helping them with their articles,
• initiating and supervising peer-review process.

Each category in Scholarpedia, like "Reinforcement Learning", "NeuroImaging", "Olfaction", "Pattern Recognition", etc., will have its own Editor. When the majority of articles in a category are published as a part of a printed Encyclopedia, the editor's name appears on the front cover of the Encyclopedia.

Editors of Scholarpedia must be elected by the public based on their scholarly achievements and reputation in the field (using the same procedure as election of authors).

However, during next few months, Scholarpedia needs to invite a few editors to test-drive the editorial system. If you would like to join this project as an editor, please send your CV or link to your webpage to the Editor-in-Chief@scholarpedia.org. Indicate which category you would like to be considered for. Preference will be given to those experts who

• have already served on editorial boards of peer-review journals, or
• have already contributed to Scholarpedia (as an author or reviewer), or
• have an equivalent of tenure or tenure-track position, or
• have high Scholar Index.

Eugene M. Izhikevich – Editor-in-Chief of Scholarpedia, the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia.