Scholarpedia:Invitation to Touch

Dear %NAME%,

As editors of Scholarpedia, we would like to invite you to write an entry "%TITLE%" for the chapter "Touch" in Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, 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 "%TITLE%" in Scholarpedia (see below).

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Scholarpedia hosts multiple focused encyclopedias; most of them will be published in a printed form and all will be freely available online. Your article will be part of many of them. In addition, it will be automatically linked to from every other article in Scholarpedia that mentions your title anywhere in the text, resulting in potentially millions of readers during the next few years. Upon approval, articles in Scholarpedia are archived in a journal (ISSN 1941-6016) so that they could be cited as any other peer-reviewed article.

The aim of the Scholarpedia "Encyclopedia of Touch" is to provide a comprehensive set of articles, written by leading researchers and peer-reviewed by fellow scientists, detailing the current scientific understanding of tactile sensing and its neural substrates in animals including man. It is hoped that the encyclopedia will encourage sharing of ideas and insights between researchers working on different aspects of touch and in different species, including research in synthetic touch systems. In addition it is hoped that the encyclopedia will raise awareness of research in tactile sensing and promote increased scientific and public interest in the field. The Encyclopedia of Touch is part-sponsored by the European Union Framework 7 BIOTACT project (http://www.biotact.org), one of whose goals is to promote research in the fields of natural and synthetic tactile sensing.

The Encyclopedia of Touch currently has the following major divisions:

• General Touch: Basic principles of mechanosensory transduction; types of mechanoreceptor in invertebrates and vertebrates; evolution of tactile sensory systems; forms of touch.
• Cutaneous Touch: focusing on fingertip and manual touch in primates including humans
• Vibrissal Touch: focusing on vibrissal sensing in rodents such as rats and mice
• Comparative Touch: focusing on touch sensing in other tactile specialists
• Synthetic Touch: focusing on the efforts to devise artificial tactile sensory systems

Current agreed contributors to the Encyclopedia include many noted experts in tactile sensing: Lazlo Acsady (Vibrissal thalamic gating), Ehud Ahissar(Vibrissal location decoding), Kevin Alloway (Vibrissal basal ganglia circuits, Vibrissal cortices interconnectivity), Ehsan Arabzadeh (Vibrissal texture decoding), Steven Barlow (Orofacial touch), Fredrich Barth (Tactile sensing in Arachnids), Sliman Bensmaia (Texture from touch), Michael Brecht (Vibrissal encoding by cortical spikes), Manuel Castro-Alamancos (Vibrissal thalamic modes), Kenneth Catania (Tactile sensing in the Star-nosed Mole), Elaine Chapman (Tactile suppression), Chris Comer (Tactile sensing in the Naked Mole Rat), Guido Dehnhardt (Vibrissal touch in seals), Stuart Derbyshire (Painful touch), Martin Deschenes (Vibrissal afferents from trigeminus to cortices), Mathew Diamond (Vibrissal texture decoding), Chris Dijkerman (Central touch disorders), Volker Duerr (Stick insect antennae), Ford Ebner (Vibrissal paralemniscal loops), Andreas Engel (S1 high-frequency activity)< Dirk Feldmeyer (S1 microcircuits), Andrew French (Invertebrate mechanoreception), Mitch Glickstein and Ned Jenkinson (Vibrissal cerebellar loops), David Golomb (Vibrissal thalamic circuits), Miriam Goodman (Molecular basis of touch), Mitra Hartmann (Vibrissa mechanical properties), Vincent Hayward (Tactile illusions), Morton Heller (Visually-impaired touch), Steve Hsiao (Fingertip transducers), Mark Jacquin (Vibrissal brainstem microcircuits), Lynette Jones (Thermal touch), Jon Kaas (Primate S1 cortex), Astrid Kappers (Shape from touch), Asaf Keller (Vibrissal midbrain loops), Catherine Kerr (Therapeutic touch), Shigeru Kitazawa (Tactile temporal order), David Kleinfeld (Vibrissa sensorimotor system), Ilan Lampl (Cortical balance of inhibition and excitation), Ellen Lumpkin (Mammalian mechanoreception), Francis McGlone (Emotional touch), Miguel Nicolelis (Vibrissal coding in hippocampus), Quoc-Thang Nguyen (Vibrissal brainstem loop functions), Jiro Okada(Cockroach antennae), Carl Petersen (Cortical sensorimotor signal flow), Tony Prescott (Whisking behavior), Vilayanur Ramachandran (Phantom touch), Roger Reep (Tactile hair in Manatees), Cornelius Schwarz (Whisking control by motor cortex), Phil Servos (Imaging human touch), Daniel Shulz (S1 long-term plasticity), Dan Simons (Vibrissal thalamocortical transformations, Vibrissal lemniscal circuits), Madayam Srinivasan (Biomechanics of touch), Jochen Staiger (S1 laminar specialization), Jean Louis Thonnard (Development of touch), Michael Turvey (Dynamic touch), Martin Wells and Frank Grasso (Tactile sensing in the octopus), Jamie Ward (Observed touch), Johan Wessberg (Skin transducers), Lawrence Wineski (Whisking musculature), Alan Wing (Tactile control of balance), Thomas Woolsey (S1 comparative structure), Phil Zeigler (Whisking pattern generation).

The editors of the encyclopedia are:

• Tony Prescott, email t.j.prescott@sheffield.ac.uk, webpage: http://www.abrg.group.shef.ac.uk/people/tony/
• Ehud Ahissar, email: bnehud@wisemail.weizmann.ac.il, webpage: http://www.weizmann.ac.il/neurobiology/labs/ahissar/
• David Kleinfeld, email: dk@physics.ucsd.edu, webpage: http://physics.ucsd.edu/neurophysics/kleinfeldcv.html
• Alan Wing, email: a.m.wing@bham.ac.uk, webpage: http://www.symon.bham.ac.uk/people/alan.htm

For your entry on the topic "%TITLE%" the editor will be "%EDITOR%". You can write your article alone. However, we would encourage you to take a co-author, e.g., 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. We would also like to suggest the following scope for your article:

"%SCOPE%".

To avoid overlap between articles we would request that you contact your assigned editor before including material in your article that lies outside the suggested scope. Please also consult the list of other commissioned Encyclopedia of Touch articles (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Category:Touch) and feel free to contact other commissioned authors to discuss article scope.

We have created the following account for you in Scholarpedia: Username: %USERNAME% Password: %PASSWORD% To accept this invitation, please click %URL%

In this link, you will choose your self-imposed deadline and the desired frequency of automatic reminders (weekly, monthly, never).

If you cannot write this article within a reasonable period of time (say 6-15 months from this invitation), 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.

We hope your schedule would allow you to contribute to the Encyclopedia. If you cannot write this article within a reasonable period of time, please let us know ASAP (by clicking one of the two links above) so that we can invite another expert or initiate election of authors for the article. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely Yours,

Profs. Tony Prescott, Ehud Ahissar, David Kleinfeld, Alan Wing.

FURTHER INFORMATION ABOUT SCHOLARPEDIA 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 or revise 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. For example, if you read an article in Wikipedia "HM Patient", you do not know who wrote it and whether or not you could trust it. If you read Scholarpedia article "HM Patient", which is authored and curated by Brenda Milner, then you know that everything there is either written by or was later approved by Dr. Milner. In this sense, Scholarpedia is unlike anything else that has ever been done with scientific publications. Just think of what your article would look like 50 years from now!

The 13th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has "Space-Time" entry written by A. Einstein and "Psychoanalysis" entry written by S. Freud. If Britannica 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 would be willing to maintain these articles via the process of curatorship.