Scholarpedia:Invitation to Extragalactic Astronomy
Dear %NAME%,
As an editor of Scholarpedia, I would like to invite you to write a short entry "%TITLE%" for the Extragalactic Astronomy chapter of Encyclopedia of Astrophysics, which is hosted by 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". Lotfi Zadeh, the inventor of fuzzy logic, wrote "Fuzzy Logic". Edward Lorenz, the discoverer of phenomenon of chaos, writes "Butterfly Effect". Kiyoshi Ito, the creator of stochastic calculus, writes "Ito Calculus". Yakov Sinai, Kolmogorov's student, wrote "Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy", and so on. Among authors of Scholarpedia are 5 Nobel Laureates and 2 Fields Medalist.
The new Encyclopedia of Cosmology is the lastest of the Scholarpedia encyclopedias, and it will contain articles on topics such as First Stars, Quintessens and Gamma Ray Bursts, within categories such as Big Bang, Dark Ages, Dark Energy and Matter, Cosmic Lighthouses and more.
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 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 us know as soon as possible by clicking the decline link %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 "Accretion Discs", you do not know who wrote it and whether or not you could trust it. If you read Scholarpedia article "Accretion Discs", which is authored and curated by Marek A. Abramowicz, then you know that everything there is either written by or was later approved by Dr. Abramowicz. 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 Z. 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 (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.
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,
Bertil F. Dorch, Editor of Scholarpedia.
Astronomer, senior scientist and honorary associate professor at Niels Bohr Institute and Copenhagen University Library, Copenhagen, Denmark
