Scholarpedia:Invitation to Electrophysiology
Dear %NAME%,
As an editor, I would like to invite you to write a short entry "%TITLE%" for the Electrophysiology chapter of Scholarpedia - the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia. This project, being a synthesis of 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 whole topic "%TITLE%" in Scholarpedia (see below).
Most articles in Scholarpedia are written by the original authors. For example, Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractals, writes "Fractals" and "Mandelbrot Set". Franz Halberg, who coined the word 'circadian', writes "Chronobiology" and "Circadian Rhythm". Lotfi Zadeh, the inventor of fuzzy logic, wrote "Fuzzy Logic". Edward Lorenz, the discoverer of phenomenon of chaos, writes "Butterfly Effect". Vernon Mountcastle writes "Cortical Columns". Robert Galambos, the discoverer of sonar in bats, writes "Echolocation in Bats". Larry Weiskrantz, the discoverer of the phenomenon of blindsight, wrote "Blindsight". Eugene Roberts, the discoverer of GABA, writes "GABA Receptors". Graham L. Collingridge, the discover of NMDA receptors, writes "NMDA Receptors". Thomas Reese and John Heuser, the discoverers of synaptic vesicles, write "Synaptic Vesicles". Seiji Ogawa, the inventor of fMRI, writes "fMRI". Brenda Milner is writing "HM Patient". Tim Bliss, the discoverer of LTP in neurons, writes "Long-Term Potentiation". John O'Keefe and Lynn Nadel are writing "Cognitive Map" (they both are also nominated for the "Place Cells"). Edvard Moser writes "Grid Cells". H. Barlow, the discoverer of lateral inhibition and the inventor of the concept of a grandmother cell, writes "Lateral Inhibition" and "Grandmother Cell". Michel Jouvet, the discoverer of REM sleep, writes "REM (paradoxical) Sleep". Gordon Shepherd, the discoverer of dendro-dendritic synapses, writes "Dendro-Dendritic Synapses". A. Damasio writes "Emotions". Gerald Edelman writes "Neural Darwinism".
The original discoverers were invited for such articles as "MRI", "Voltage-Sensitive Dyes", "Patch Clamp", "Working Memory", "Split Brain", "Saltatory Conduction", etc.
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 many of them, in particular, it will be part of Encyclopedia of Neuroscience and probably of Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. 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.
Most articles in Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience that have the name "XXX Model" are written by the original authors, XXX. (i.e., R. FitzHugh wrote "FitzHugh-Nagumo Model", J. Cowan writes "Wilson-Cowan Model", T. Kohonen wrote "Konohen Network", J.J. Hopdield wrote "Hopfield Network", A. Huxley writes "Hodgkin-Huxley Model", H. Lecar writes "Morris-Lecar Model", J. Hindmarsh writes "Hindmarsh-Rose Model", B. Ermentrout wrote "Ermentrout-Kopell Canonical Model", etc.). Most articles in the Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems (another sister project in Scholarpedia) that have the name "XXX Theorem" or similar are also written by the original authors, (i.e., M. Jakobson writes "Jakobson Theorem", S. Smale writes "Smale Horseshoe", Ya. Sinai writes "Kolmogorov-Sinai Entropy", K. Ito writes "Ito Calculus", etc.). Among authors of Scholarpedia are 5 Nobel Laureates and 2 Fields Medalist.
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 us know as soon as possible by clicking %URL%&no=1 In this case, we would highly appreciate your suggesting the names of the best experts 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. 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 "HM Patient", you do not know who wrote it and whether or not you could trust it. If you read 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 would look like 50 years from now!
The 13th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has "Space-Time" entry written by A. Einstein and "Psychoanalysis" entry written by S. 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. 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.
Another unique feature of Scholarpedia is that its authors are either invited by the editor-in-chief, a Category 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 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 were nominated; you are welcome to participate in the election; some of the nominated experts already agreed to write the articles, if elected).
I hope your schedule would allow you to contribute to the Encyclopedia. If you cannot write this article within a reasonable period of time, please let me know ASAP (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.
Sincerely Yours, Eugene M. Izhikevich - editor-in-chief of Scholarpedia.
