Scholarpedia:Invitation to Motor Control
Dear %NAME%,
As editor, I would like to invite you to write a short entry "%TITLE%" for the new Encyclopedia of Motor Control section of Scholarpedia. We have some exciting articles already commissioned including
Action and perception (Mel Goodale), Bayesian sensorimotor control (Konrad Koerding), Dystonia (Terry Sanger), Locomotor learning (Amy Bastian), Motor Cortex Control (Stephen Scott) Motor Cortex Representations (John Kalaska), Neural Prosthetics (Krishna Shenoy), Object manipulation (Randy Flanagan), Optimal Feedback Control (Emo Todorov) and Reach learning: (Reza Shadmehr).
We would love to have an article from you to add to this growing collection and you are welcome to invite co-authors to join you.
As you may know Scholarpedia (http://www.scholarpedia.org) is a peer-reviewed encyclopedia. Your article will be peer-reviewed, cited (as any other journal article), and freely available online. In addition, you will become the curator (owner) of the topic "%TITLE%" in Scholarpedia (see below, but in reality a minimal commitment).
Scholarpedia already has a growing Computational Neuroscience/Neuroscience section. If you take a look at
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Encyclopedia_of_computational_neuroscience
you will see the vision section, for example, has over 120 articles by luminaries in the field. Our aim is to populate an equally impressive Motor Control section with short articles suitable for graduate level students, acting as a high-quality online encyclopedic reference for the community. To achieve this target, we will invite the world--acknowledged experts to write on each topic.
Below you will find more detailed information on Scholarpedia. To flourish, we need the help of the key experts in the field, including yours. If you are interested in writing the entry, we can invite co-authors you trust (main collaborators or younger researchers) to help you in the task.
If you accept this invitation, after reviewers' approval, the article will be published in our free on-line journal (ISSN 1941-6016 by the Library of Congress, USA) and will be citable like eg %NAME% (2011) %TITLE%. Scholarpedia, 1(3):1300".
Please notify us of your decision as soon as possible:
- To formally ACCEPT this invitation, and to create an account in Scholarpedia, follow the link %URL%
- To DECLINE the invitation, follow instead the link: %URL%&no=1 (In this case suggestions for alternative authors will be greatly appreciated.)
If you are interested in becoming a Scholarpedia author, but you prefer to contribute with a different entry, or if you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
I hope you will accept this invitation; if you cannot write this article within a reasonable period of time (3-6 months), please let me know (by clicking one of the two links above) so that I can invite another expert for this article. In any case I would be grateful for your quick response
I look forward to hearing from you and hope you will join us in this endeavor.
Daniel Wolpert, University of Cambridge
Editor of the Encyclopedia of Motor Control
wolpert@eng.cam.ac.uk
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APPENDIX: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARPEDIA
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About Scholarpedia
Scholarpedia is a fully open access encyclopedia, meaning that (1) no fee or subscription is required to access its content; (2) no publication charge is imposed to authors. Articles in Scholarpedia are written in a volunteer basis, meaning that no author is payed for his work. Scholarpedia is maintained by the community of scholars, mainly on a volunteer basis. All kind of legal economical support is welcome to let Scholarpedia survive [2].
All articles in Scholarpedia are written by universally acknowledged experts; many articles are written by truly living legends and are frequently eponymous (i.e. carry the name of the author). For an updated list of all Nobel Laureates, Fields Medalists and eponymous authors in Scholarpedia, see http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Authors.
Scholarpedia has no connection to Wikipedia, apart the fact that we use the same free software supporting the wikitext markup language: mediawiki ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki ). That is why sometimes we make external links to some help pages in Wikipedia.
Curatorship and modifications
Scholarpedia does not publish "research" or "position" papers, but rather "living reviews" on established topics. In Scholarpedia identified users can edit articles, even after they have been peer-reviewed and published. We believe that this process is useful, because, say, other scholars may find and correct an error in an article, add a figure, rewrite a paragraph that is not clearly written, suggest new developments of the field and so on. Nevertheless, a peculiar feature of Scholarpedia is the fact that each article has a "curator" and that suggested modifications of an article are not showed publicly without curator's approval. All modifications to the article are saved and numbered [the modifier being registered] so that everybody can see say the differences among the first submitted version, the versions after approval and the version after 10 years. The name of the curator appears in the article page.
By default the fist curator of an article is one (or more) of its authors, who are free to resign from this charge in any moment (moreover they can suggest a new curator they trust).
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 of being curators of these articles. The ideal goal of Scholarpedia is to invite today's Einsteins and Freuds to write entries on their major discoveries so that future generation of experts will maintain these articles via the process of curatorship. This way, Scholarpedia will provide a perpetually up-to-date high-quality reference for the scholars' community, like no other peer-reviewed journal or encyclopedia.
The ideal article in Scholarpedia
The ideal article of Scholarpedia fulfills two challenging requirements: (1) it is written in clear concise and pedagogical style, as appropriate for graduate students and non-expert researchers; (2) it satisfies Einstein's razor "make it as simple as possible, but no simpler".
The size/structure of articles
Concerning the format of contributions they are quantized in terms of a web-page. A web-page is sized from 2 to 15 pages and in any case should be less than 50 KBytes all figures, equations, tables... included. It is up to your taste to decide among the following possibilities: A) write a single--page article, B) write an article with a main page and as many subpages (appendixes) as needed, C) split your contribution in a set of self consistent articles of previous types.
About the Encyclopedia of Motor Control
The "Encyclopedia of Motor Control" is a young Scholarpedia project started in January 2011.
For up-to-date information see http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Encyclopedia_of_Motor_Control
Your article
If you accept our invitation, your article will be peer-reviewed and freely available online after his completion. After its approval, the article will be archived in Scholarpedia's free online journal (ISSN 1941-6016 by the Library of Congress, USA) [3] and it will be cited like eg "Izhikevich E. M. (2006) Bursting. Scholarpedia, 1(3):1300". or more precisely "Izhikevich E. M. (2006) Bursting. Scholarpedia, 1(3):1300, revision 1401"
As an author you will have the freedom to select the copyright policy for your article from the choices: (1) author owns the copyright and licenses the content to Scholarpedia, (2) Creative Commons, (3) GNU FDL.
In addition to being the author of the article, you will become its curator. Curatorship task typically takes less than one hour per year; in any case curator is free to resign at any moment (and to choose a successor he trusts).
Your Account
The following account was created for you in Scholarpedia: Username: %USERNAME% Password: %PASSWORD%
Co-authors
You can have as many co-authors and co-curators as you wish. Instructions for inviting authors/co-authors can be found at http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Register. Consider inviting your collaborators as co-authors and taking former students or a post-docs as co-curators, to take care of the article on the long run.
Suggestions and self-candidature for other entries
Suggestions for other topics which another expert (or maybe you) could write, are in any case welcome, especially if you feel that your article is not fully self-consistent and needs some other correlated articles to be understandable. Before sending a suggestion for an author, be sure that your candidate is a universally-acknowledged authority of the field. To submit suggestions, please follow instructions at http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Suggest_authors.
Wikitext
Articles in Scholarpedia are presently written in Wikitext markup language. Wikitext is intended to be simpler than LaTeX2e and anyway allows for writing equations in LaTeX2e (with AMS-LaTeX package). An average Latex user can learn how to write an article in few hours.
IMPORTANT REMARK: If you feel you cannot deal with wikitext consider having a young co-author to help you in this task. In any case do not give up for this reason: we have a few (just a few!) assistant editors (volunteer students) that will be happy to help you in the task.
More informations
A basic visual help explaining how to log-in and more basic topics is available at http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Help:Visual_help_for_authors More detailed instructions are available at http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Instructions_for_authors_%28Physics%29
