Scholarpedia:Invitation to Space-Time and Gravitation
Dear %NAME%,
As editors of Scholarpedia, the peer-reviewed open-access encyclopedia of the international scholars' community, we have the great honor and privilege of inviting you to write the entry "%TITLE%" for our encyclopedia. (The final title of the article and its contents open to discussion.)
The main goal of Scholarpedia is to be a high-quality online encyclopedic reference for the whole scholars' community. To achieve this target, we invite the world's best acknowledged experts in each topic. In the appendix you will find more detailed information on Scholarpedia: its unique features, its high quality standards, and its authoritative authors, which presently include 15 Nobel-prize winners, 3 Fields medalists, 9 (ICTP) Dirac medalists, 13 Heineman prize winners, and more than 100 eponymous authors.
Scholarpedia is free for authors and readers, but, to survive and grow, this ambitious project needs the help of experts from all fields of knowledge, including yours.
We can imagine that your schedule is very charged, but if you are interested in writing the entry you should not worry about schedule problems: in Scholarpedia we are not overly concerned by deadlines, just by article quality. If you accept the invitation you will be asked to fix a self-imposed deadline (up to t+12 months). You will be able to modify this deadline as many times as necessary to complete your article (from 2 to 15 pages). Moreover, if you like, we can invite co-authors you trust (main collaborators or younger researchers) to help you in the task.
If you accept this invitation, after peer review, the article will be published in our free on-line journal (ISSN 1941-6016 by the Library of Congress, USA) and will be citable e.g., %NAME% (2008) %TITLE%. Scholarpedia, 1(3):1300".
Please notify us your decision as soon as possible:
- To formally ACCEPT this invitation, 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 kind of question/problem, do not hesitate to contact us.
We truly hope you will accept this invitation; in any case thank you for your attention, your time and your quick answer (by following the links above or by replying to this email).
Looking forward to hearing from you, our best and respectful regards,
For the Scholarpedia editorial board
Patrick Peter, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, France -- Editor of the Encyclopedia of Space-time and Gravitation
Appendix: A brief introduction to Scholarpedia
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 contributors are not paid for their work. Scholarpedia is maintained by the community of scholars. All kind of legal economical support is welcome to let Scholarpedia survive [1].
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). This is why there are external links to Wikipedia help pages.
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 first 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 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. In 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:
- it is written in clear concise and pedagogical style, as appropriate for graduate students and non-expert researchers.
- 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 should be 2-15 printed pages and should be less than 50 KBytes total, all figures, equations, and tables included. It is up to your taste to decide among the following possibilities:
- write a single page article,
- write an article with a main page and as many subpages (appendixes) as needed,
- split your contribution in a set of self-consistent articles of previous types.
About the Encyclopedia of Physics
The "Encyclopedia of Physics" is a Scholarpedia project started in June 2008.
Among its articles you can find:
- Adler sum rule by Steven Adler
- Axial anomaly by Roman W. Jackiw
- Arnowitt-Deser-Misner formalism by Stanley Deser
- Attractor by John W. Milnor
- Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory by Leon Cooper and Dmitri Feldman
- Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin symmetry by Carlo M. Becchi and Camillo Imbimbo
- Bekenstein bound by Jacob D. Bekenstein
- Bethe-Salpeter equation (origins) by Edwin E. Salpeter
- Calabi-Yau manifold by Shing-Tung Yau
- Coherent state (Quantum mechanics), by John Klauder
- Cosmic X-ray sources by Riccardo Giacconi and Piero Rosati
- Cosmic background explorer by John C. Mather and Gary F Hinshaw
- Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble mechanism by Thomas W B Kibble
- Fluctuation theorem by Giovanni Gallavotti
- Gauge theories by Gerard 't Hooft
- Glashow-Iliopoulos-Maiani mechanism by Jean Iliopoulos
- Goodenough-Kanamori rule by John B. Goodenough
- Gutzwiller wave function by Florian Gebhardand and Martin Gutzwiller
- Kondo effect by Jun Kondo and Alex Hewson
- Landshoff-Nachtmann model by Peter Landshoff
- Laser by Charles H. Townes and Jeff Hecht
- Lieb-Liniger model of a Bose Gas by Elliott Lieb
- Spin-coefficient formalism by Ezra (Ted) Newman and Roger Penrose
- Path integral by Jean Zinn-Justin
- Quantum Chaos by Martin Gutzwiller
- Rayleigh-Taylor instability and mixing by Andrew W. Cook and David Youngs
- Shifman-Vainshtein-Zakharov sum rule by Mikhail Shifman
- Time's arrow and Boltzmann's entropy by Joel L. Lebowitz
- Turbulence by U. Frisch and R. Benzi
For updated information see http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Encyclopedia_of_physics.
Your article
Upon accepting our invitation, your article will be peer-reviewed and freely available online after its completion. After 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 as 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. The curatorship task typically takes less than one hour per year; the curator is free to resign at any time (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 maintain the article over the long-term.
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 widely acknowledged authority of the field. To submit suggestions, please follow the 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 allows for writing equations in LaTeX2e (with the AMS-LaTeX package). An average LaTeX user can learn how to write an article in few hours.
IMPORTANT REMARK: If you do not wish to compose your article directly in wikitext, consider having a co-author assist you with this task. In any case do not give up for this reason: we have assistant editors (volunteers) available that will be happy to help in any way possible.
More information
A basic visual help explaining how to log in and other 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
