Scholarpedia:Invitation to Models of Neurons
Dear %NAME%,
As an editor, I would like to invite you to write a short entry "%TITLE%" to the "Models of Neurons" category of Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience and Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence, which are 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". Michel Jouvet, the co-discoverer of REM sleep, writes "REM Sleep". Franz Halberg, the discoverer of circadian rhythms, writes "Chronobiology" and "Circadian Rhythm". Robert Galambos, the discoverer of sonar in bats, writes "Echolocation in Bats". Tim Bliss, the discoverer of LTP, writes "Long-Term Potentiation". Larry Weiskrantz, the discoverer of the phenomoneon of blindsight, writes "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". Paul Lauterbur, the co-inventor of MRI, writes "MRI". Seiji Ogawa, the inventor of fMRI, writes "fMRI". Anthony T. Barker, who invented TMS, agreed to write "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation". Brenda Milner writes "HM Patient". Richard Karp, the inventor of the notion of NP-completeness, writes "NP-Completeness". Lotfi Zadeh, the inventor of fuzzy logic, writes "Fuzzy Logic". John Holland, the inventor of genetic algorithms, writes "Genetic Algorithms". Ichiji Tasaki, the co-discoverer of saltatory conduction (with Hodgkin in 1939), writes "Saltatory Conduction" (Tasaki is 97). Edward Lorenz, the discoverer of chaos, writes "Butterfly Effect". Vernon Mountcastle, the discoverer of cortical columnar organization, writes "Cortical Columns". Gerald Edelman, the creator of neural Darwinism, writes "Neural Darwinism".
If you click on the "Computational Neuroscience" link (left menu), you will see the list of suggested articles for the encyclopedia. Most of them have already been reserved, and many have been peer-reviewed and accepted. Click on each article to see the names of the authors. Click "Random article" (left menu) to see sample peer-reviewed articles. %YOURNAMEWASSUGGESTED% You can write your article alone. However, we strongly recommend to have a co-author, e.g., a former student or a postdoc, who would take care of the article on the long run (as your co-curator). The Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience will be published in a printed form, but its main purpose is to remain online so that it can evolve and be maintained by the community.
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, or click %URL%&no=1
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, 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 on "Mandelbrot Set", you do not know who wrote it and whether or not you could trust it. If you read Scholarpedia article "Mandelbrot Set", which is authored and curated by Benoit Mandelbrot, then you know that everything there is either written by or was later approved by Dr. Mandelbrot. 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 20 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 (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).
Other participants include Moshe Abeles ("Synfire Chains"), Antonio Damasio ("Emotions"), Richard FitzHugh ("FitzHugh-Nagumo Model"), Otto Rossler ("Rossler Attractor"), Leon Chua ("Chua Circuit"), Roger D. Traub ("Fast Oscillations"), Harold Lecar ("Morris-Lecar Model"), Jim Hindmarsh ("Hindmarsh-Rose Model"), Jack Cowan ("Wilson-Cowan Model"),Bard Ermentrout ("Ermentrout-Kopell Model"), Wil Rall ("Rall Model"), Yoshiki Kuramoto ("Kuramoto Model"), Anatol Zhabotinsky ("Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction"), Teuvo Kohonen ("Kohonen Network"), John Hopfield ("Hopfield Network"), Jay McClelland ("Connectionism"), Bernard Widrow ("Adaline"), Steve Grossberg ("Adaptive Resonance Theory"), Rodolfo Llinas ("Purkinje Neuron"), Wulfram Schultz ("Reward"), Clive Granger ("Granger Causality"), Elie Bienenstock and Leon Cooper ("BCM"). Even Sir Andrew Huxley agreed to participate in the "Hodgkin-Huxley Model".
I hope your schedule would allow you to contribute to the Encyclopedia. If you cannot write this article, please let me know ASAP 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, Frances Skinner – editor of Scholarpedia (category "Models of Neurons")
Toronto Western Research Institute (TWRI), University Health Network (UHN) and University of Toronto, CANADA
