Scholarpedia:Invitation to Optics
Dear %NAME%,
Dear Prof. Colin J. R. Sheppard,
As editor of Scholarpedia (http://www.scholarpedia.org) I would like invite you to write the entry "%TITLE%" for our open-access peer-reviewed encyclopedia.
Scholarpedia is meant to be the highest reference for the whole scholars' community. That is why we invite only leading experts on each subject, and very often living legends (we are proud of our authors see http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Authors). Up to now, 18 Noble Prize winners have for instance accepted to contribute, including Charles Townes and John Hall for the Optics category.
We would be happy to count you among our authors.
There are a few things you need to know before you accept our invitation :
- The article in Scholarpedia are rather short. We do not ask you a huge article, but only a short review on %TITLE%. Writing such an article should be something easy for you, and should not require too much time. Once you will have accepted, you will be asked to fix a self-imposed deadline (up to 6 months).
- You can invite as many co-authors you want to join your effort. Feel free to invite colleagues you trust or post-docs you can supervise for instance.
- The article will be peer-reviewed and published in an open-access on-line journal (ISSN 1941-6016 by the Library of Congress, USA) so that it can be cited like e.g. "%NAME% (2010) %TITLE%. Scholarpedia, 1(3):1300".
As you will see, Scholarpedia is not just another encyclopedia. It is meant to be the _ultimate_ reference for students and researchers from all fields. That is why it is so important that you, as a recognized expert in your area, accept to write the article "%TITLE%". This message contains, as an appendix, a more detailed presentation of Scholarpedia.
If you have questions, if you think you need any help of any kind, if the title of the article doesn't suit you, feel free to contact us.
Pleas notify us your decision by following the links below :
- To ACCEPT this invitation, follow the link %URL%.
- To DECLINE the invitation, follow instead the link: %URL%&no=1
An account has been created for you on Scholarpedia: Username: %USERNAME% Password: %PASSWORD% which you can freely use to explore Scholarpedia and to contribute.
Looking forward to hearing from you soon,
For the Scholarpedia editorial board,
Antoine Moreau, Blaise Pascal University, France -- Editor of Optics and Lasers
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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 paid for his work.
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 ). In our wildest dreams, Scholarpedia could heavily influence (and why not replace ?) 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 Encyclopædia 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 of the same field or 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 Physics
Your article will be part of the Encyclopedia of Physics on Scholarpedia.
For a list of articles and authors, see http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Encyclopedia_of_physics.
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) [2] and it will be cited like e.g. "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 assistant editors (volunteer students) that will be happy to help you in the task.
More information
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
