Scholarpedia:Invitation to Population Biology
Dear %NAME%,
As an editor, I would like to invite you to write a short entry "%TITLE%" for the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Ecology, which is hosted by Scholarpedia - the open-access peer-reviewed encyclopedia. This project, being a synthesis of the philosophies of Encyclopedia Britannica and openness of Wikipedia, is ambitious and unique. You can read more about it at http://www.scholarpedia.org. 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).
Many articles in Scholarpedia are written by the the original authors and inventors. For example, Lotfi Zadeh, the inventor of fuzzy logic, wrote "Fuzzy logic"; Herman Haken, the creator of synergetics, wrote "Synergetics" and "Self-organization"; Robert Galambos, the discoverer of sonar in bats, wrote "Echolocation in bats" (Galambos is 94); Paul Lauterbur, the inventor of MRI, wrote "MRI" (Paul died in 2007). Seiji Ogawa, the inventor of fMRI, wrote "fMRI"; Ichiji Tasaki, the discoverer of saltatory conduction in neurons (in 1938), wrote "Saltatory Conduction" (Tasaki is 98); Rita Levi-Montalcini, the discoverer of Nerve Growth Factor, writes "NGF" (she is 98 - the oldest living Nobel Laureate); John J. Hopfield, the creator of a popular neural net, wrote "Hopfield Network", and so on. Among authors of Scholarpedia are many Nobel Laureates and Fields Medalists; see http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Authors.
In the field of ecology, we already have many prominent participants. <Alan, give examples here>.
Recent "Nature Physics" editorial discussed the success of Scholarpedia as "...an intrinsic part of the academic landscape" http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v4/n7/full/nphys1012.html
Click "Random article" (left menu) to see sample peer-reviewed articles. %YOURNAMEWASSUGGESTED% 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 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.
If you cannot write this article within a reasonable period of time, please me know as soon as possible by clicking %URL%&no=1 In this case, I 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 (typically a small investment of time). For example, if you read an article in Wikipedia on "fMRI", you do not know who wrote it and whether or not you can 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 an editor (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.
I hope your schedule would allow you to contribute to the open access Encyclopedia. If you cannot write this article within a reasonable period of time, please let me know (by clicking one of the two links above) 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, Alan Hastings,
Editor of "Mathematical Ecology" within Scholarpedia Distinguished Professor Environmental Science and Policy University of California Davis, CA 95616
amhastings@ucdavis.edu 530-752-8116 web page: http://two.ucdavis.edu/~me
