Scholarpedia:Invitation to Marine Biology
Dear %NAME%,
As an editor of Scholarpedia, I would like to invite you to write a short entry entitled "%TITLE%".
Scholarpedia is a peer-reviewed, open-access encyclopedia. You can read more about it at http://www.scholarpedia.org.
Articles appearing on Scholarpedia are (1) freely available to anyone with an internet connection, (2) written by world-leading scholars such as yourself, and by invitation only, and (3) peer-reviewed prior to publication and can be cited as for any other peer-reviewed journal article (e.g. Chase, R (2007) Gastropod reproductive behavior. Scholarpedia, 2(9):4125).
As author of an article, you will become its curator (owner). Thus, readers of your article can suggest changes (additions, deletions, clarifications) though the suggested changes will not appear online until you (as the authority on this subject) have given approval. Such an innovative approach to peer-review publications ensures the subject matter is up to date and allows it to evolve with the field of study. Curator duties are expected to consume less than 1 hour per year.
All articles in Scholarpedia are written by the acknowledged experts on the subject and many articles are written by living legends -- the original authors and inventors. For example, "Fuzzy logic" was written by its inventor, Lotfi Zadeh; Herman Haken, the creator of synergetics, wrote "Synergetics" and "Self-organization"; the discoverer of sonar in bats, Robert Galambos, wrote "Echolocation in bats"; "MRI" was written by its inventor, the late Paul Lauterbur; similarly "fMRI" was written by its inventor, Seiji Ogawa; Ichiji Tasaki, the discoverer of saltatory conduction in neurons (in 1938), wrote "Saltatory Conduction".
Among authors of Scholarpedia are many Nobel Laureates and Fields Medalists; see http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Authors
Click "Random article" (left menu) to see sample peer-reviewed articles. You can have as many co-authors as you wish; consider taking a former student or a postdoc, who would take care of the article on the long run (as your co-curator). The instructions for authors are at http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Instructions_for_Authors
The following account was created for you in Scholarpedia: Username: %USERNAME% Password: %PASSWORD% To accept this invitation, please click %URL% There, you will choose your self-imposed deadline.
Your article will be available to the public immediately upon its completion.
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, revise, and improve 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 (this typically takes less than one hour per year). For example, if you read an article in Wikipedia on "fMRI", you do not know who wrote it and whether or not you could trust it. If you read Scholarpedia article "fMRI", which was written and is curated by Seiji Ogawa, then you know that everything there is either written by or was later approved by Dr. Ogawa - the inventor of fMRI. In this sense, Scholarpedia provides a perpetually up-to-date source of scientific information, like no other peer-reviewed journal.
Articles in Scholarpedia are cross-linked. Any other article that mentions your title anywhere in the text will have an automatic link to your article, bringing thousands of readers. Scholarpedia was assigned ISSN 1941-6016 by the Library of Congress, USA, and hence its articles "... can be cited exactly as articles in other peer-reviewed journals can" (Nature editorial).
I hope your schedule would allow you to contribute to the open access Encyclopedia. I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Dr. Tim C. Edgell, Editor of Scholarpedia
LGL Limited environmental research associates, Sidney, BC, Canada, Email: tedgell@lgl.com, Office: 250-656-0127
