Scholarpedia:Invitation to Neuroethology
Dear %NAME%,
As an editor, I would like to invite you to write a short entry entitled "%TITLE%" for Neuroethology (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Category:Neuroethology), 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 of "%TITLE%" in Scholarpedia (see below).
The goal of Neuroethology in Scholarpedia is to provide a perpetually up-to-date reference about the neural neural basis of natural behavior. This includes information on neuroethological model systems and conceptual approaches in neuroethology. This can be a starting point for students seeking to learn about these model systems and approaches. It will also serve as a reference for general aspects of the neural basis of natural behavior.
You can write your article alone. However, I encourage you to take a co-author, e.g., a colleague, 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.
Sincerely Yours,
Paul S. Katz [1]
Editor of Neuroethology in Scholarpedia
<pkatz@gsu.edu>
Here is a description of Scholarpedia written by the Editor-in-Chief, Eugene M. Izhikevich [2]:
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.
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 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 will 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, especially for the topics where there are no clear "original inventors or discoverers".
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. This also contributes to the high Google PageRank of Scholarpedia, so that its finished articles are typically at the top of Google search results, thereby providing the major source of information to the public. 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" (according to the Nature editorial).
