Scholarpedia:Invitation to Scholarpedia
Dear %NAME%,
As an editor-in-chief, I would like to invite you to write a short entry "%TITLE%" for Scholarpedia - the 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). This will make your article that authoritative source for information on "%TITLE%" that can be constantly up to date.
All articles in Scholarpedia are written by the acknowledged experts on the subject and many articles are written by living legends -- the original authors and inventors. For example, "Fuzzy logic" was written by its inventor, Lotfi Zadeh; Herman Haken, the creator of synergetics, wrote "Synergetics" and "Self-organization"; the discoverer of sonar in bats, Robert Galambos, wrote "Echolocation in bats"; "MRI" was written by its inventor, the late Paul Lauterbur; similarly "fMRI" was written by its inventor, Seiji Ogawa; Ichiji Tasaki, the discoverer of saltatory conduction in neurons (in 1938), wrote "Saltatory Conduction".
Among authors of Scholarpedia are many Nobel Laureates and Fields Medalists; see http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Authors
As an indication of the authoritativeness of articles, many Scholarpedia articles are eponymous with their author. For example: A.M. Zhabotinsky wrote "Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction", Y. Sinai wrote "Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy", J.J. Hopfield wrote "Hopfield network".
A "Nature Physics" editorial discussed the implications of Scholarpedia's becoming "... 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. 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 instructions for authors are at http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Instructions_for_Authors
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.
Your article will be available to the public immediately upon its completion.
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.
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).
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, Eugene M. Izhikevich – Editor-in-Chief of Scholarpedia, the peer-reviewed open access encyclopedia.
