Scholarpedia:Invitation to Cognitive Neuroscience
Dear %NAME%,
As an editor, I would like to invite you to write a short entry "%TITLE%" for the Cognitive Neuroscience section of Scholarpedia - the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia. This project, being a synthesis of the philosophies of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, is ambitious and unique. You can read more about it at http://www.scholarpedia.org. Your article will be peer-reviewed, and upon acceptance, you will become the curator of the article "%TITLE%" in Scholarpedia (see below).
Many articles in Scholarpedia are written by the original authors. For example, Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractals, is writing "Fractals" and "Mandelbrot Set". Franz Halberg, who coined the word 'circadian', is writing "Chronobiology" and "Circadian Rhythm". Edward Lorenz, the discoverer of phenomenon of chaos, is writing "Butterfly Effect". Vernon Mountcastle is writing "Cortical Columns". Robert Galambos, the discoverer of sonar in bats, is writing "Echolocation in Bats" (Galambos is 93). Eugene Roberts, the discoverer of GABA, is writing "GABA Receptors". Graham L. Collingridge, the discoverer of NMDA receptors, is writing "NMDA Receptors". Thomas Reese and John Heuser, the discoverers of synaptic vesicles, are writing "Synaptic Vesicles". Paul Lauterbur, the co-inventor of MRI, is writing "MRI". Seiji Ogawa, the inventor of fMRI, is writing "fMRI". Anthony T. Barker, who invented TMS, has agreed to write "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation". Brenda Milner is writing "HM Patient", Tim Bliss, the discoverer of LTP in neurons, is writing "Long-Term Potentiation", and John O'Keefe and Lynn Nadel are writing "Cognitive Map". Edvard Moser is writing "Grid Cells". H. Barlow, the discoverer of lateral inhibition and the inventor of the concept of a grandmother cell, is writing "Lateral Inhibition" and "Grandmother Cell". Michel Jouvet, the discoverer of REM sleep, is writing "REM (paradoxical) Sleep". Gordon Shepherd, the discoverer of dendro-dendritic synapses, is writing "Dendro-Dendritic Synapses". Ichiji Tasaki, the co-discoverer of saltatory conduction (with Hodgkin in 1939), is writing "Saltatory Conduction" (Tasaki is 97). Lawrence B. Cohen, the inventor of voltage-sensitive dyes, is writing "Voltage-Sensitive Dye". A. Damasio is writing "Emotions". Among authors of Scholarpedia are 6 Nobel Laureates and 2 Fields Medalist.
Scholarpedia hosts multiple focused encyclopedias; most of them will be published in a printed form and all will be freely available online. Your article will be part of several of them. In addition, it will be automatically linked to from every other article in Scholarpedia that mentions your title anywhere in the text, resulting in potentially millions of readers during next few years.
Click "Random article" (left menu) to see sample peer-reviewed articles. %YOURNAMEWASSUGGESTED% You can write your article alone. However, I encourage you to take a co-author, e.g., a former student or postdoc, who will become your co-curator. If you want to change the title or have other preferences, please let me know.
I have created the following account for you in Scholarpedia: Username: %USERNAME% Password: %PASSWORD% To accept this invitation, please click %URL%
If you cannot write this article within a reasonable period of time, please let me know as soon as possible by clicking %URL%&no=1 In this case, I would highly appreciate your suggesting the names of the best person(s) to invite to write this article.
The main idea of Scholarpedia is that articles should outlive their authors via the process of curatorship. Similarly to Wikipedia (a free non-reviewed encyclopedia), anybody can edit or revise articles in Scholarpedia, even after they are peer-reviewed and published. For example, other scientists may find and correct an error in your article, add a figure, rewrite a paragraph that is not clearly written, and so on. However, in contrast to Wikipedia, each article in Scholarpedia has a Curator (typically, its author), whose name is at the top of the article and who accepts or rejects each such revision. For example, if you read an article in Wikipedia entitled "HM Patient", you do not know who wrote it nor whether or not you can trust it. But if you read the Scholarpedia article "HM Patient", which is authored and curated by Brenda Milner, then you know that everything there is either written by or was later approved by Dr. Milner. In this sense, Scholarpedia is unlike anything else that has ever been done with scientific publications. Just think of what your article might look like 50 years from now!
The 13th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has a "Space-Time" entry written by A. Einstein and a "Psychoanalysis" entry written by S. Freud. If Britannica had had the 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 and tomorrow's Einsteins and Freuds to write entries on their major discoveries so that future generations of experts will maintain these articles via the process of curatorship.
Another unique feature of Scholarpedia is that its authors are either invited by an editor (this letter) or elected by the public. Public election of authors ensures fairness in assigning articles to the corresponding experts in each field. Soon Scholarpedia will be transferred to an election-only regime. Among first elected experts were Gyorgy Buzsaki (Hippocampus) and Rodolfo Llinas (Neurons). There is still an ongoing election of authors for such articles as "Synapse", "STDP", "Dynamic Clamp", "Memory", "Cell Assemblies", and many others, since it is not clear who would be the best expert to write such articles (click on these articles in Scholarpedia to see who has been nominated; you are welcome to participate in the election; some of the nominated experts already agreed to write the articles, if elected).
I very much hope that your schedule will allow you to contribute to the Encyclopedia. If you cannot write this article within a reasonable period of time, please let me know (by clicking one of the two links above) so that I can invite another expert or initiate election of authors for the article. I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Please feel free to contact me if I can help you with any extra information or clarifications. I will be more than happy to help.
Sincerely Yours, Anil K. Seth, editor of "Cognitive Neuroscience" section of Scholarpedia.
