Scholarpedia:Invitation to Vision
Dear %NAME%,
I would like to invite you to write a short entry tentatively titled "%TITLE%" for the category Vision of Scholarpedia — the free, peer-reviewed encyclopedia. As you may know, Scholarpedia is an ambitious project combining the philosophies of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. You can read more about Scholarpedia at http://www.scholarpedia.org. The article will be peer-reviewed and, upon acceptance, you will become the "curator" of the topic in Scholarpedia (see below). The article will of course be citable. If you want to change the suggested title or have other preferences, please let me know.
All articles in Scholarpedia are written by the acknowledged experts on the subject, ideally by the original authors, discoverers, or inventors. For example, "Fuzzy logic" was written by its inventor, Lotfi Zadeh; "Synergetics" and "Self-organization" were written by their creator, Herman Haken; "Echolocation in bats" was written by its discoverer, Robert Galambos ; "MRI" was written by its inventor, the late Paul Lauterbur; similarly "fMRI" was written by its inventor, Seiji Ogawa; and "Saltatory Conduction" was written by its discoverer (in 1938), Ichiji Tasaki. Many Scholarpedia articles are eponymous with their authors. For example, Anatol M. Zhabotinsky wrote "Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction", Yakov Sinai wrote "Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy", and John J. Hopfield wrote "Hopfield network". You can review other authors who have contributed by going to http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Authors. For some further insight a recent Nature Physics editorial discussed the success of Scholarpedia (http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v4/n7/full/nphys1012.html)
You can write your article alone or take on a co-author, in which case your co-author will become your co-curator once the article is reviewed and accepted. The instructions for authors are at http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Instructions_for_Authors.
About 100 articles in Vision have been written or are underway so far and include:
- Attention and consciousness (Naotsugu Tsuchiya and Christof Koch)
- Binocular rivalry (Randolph Blake and Frank Tong)
- Blindsight (Larry Weiskrantz)
- Color vision (Karen DeValois)
- Eye movements (Keith Rayner and Monica Castelhano)
- Fusiform face area (Nancy Kanwisher)
- Gestalt principles (Dejan Todorovic)
- Inattentional blindness (Daniel J. Simons)
- Mental rotation (Roger Shepard)
- Negative priming (Steven P. Tipper and Bruce Weaver)
- Neural correlates of consciousness (Florian Mormann and Christof Koch)
- Object substitution masking (James T. Enns)
- Orientation selectivity (Robert Shapley)
- Pinna illusion (Baingio Pinna)
- Retina (John Dowling)
- Synesthesia (Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and David Brang)
- Visual masking (Bruno G. Breitmeyer and Haluk Ogmen)
- What and where pathways (Leslie G. Ungerleider and Luiz Pessoa)
For a complete list of topics in Vision, see http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Category:Vision
I have created the following account for you in Scholarpedia: Username: %USERNAME% Password: %PASSWORD% To accept this invitation, please click %URL% There, you will be able to choose your self-imposed deadline and the frequency of automatic reminders (weekly, monthly, never).
If you cannot write this article within a reasonable period of time please let me know as soon as possible by clicking %URL%&no=1 In this case, I would appreciate your sending me the names of other experts you think could do a good job on this general topic.
The main idea of Scholarpedia is that articles should outlive their authors via the process of curatorship. Similar to Wikipedia (the 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, or rewrite a paragraph that is not clearly written. As curator, however, your name will be at the top of the article, and you can accept or reject each such revision as you see fit. For example, if you read the article in Wikipedia on "Blindsight", you don't know who wrote it and whether or not to trust it. If you read Scholarpedia article "Blindsight", which is authored and curated by Larry Weiskrantz, then you know that everything there is either written by or was later approved by Weiskrantz. In this sense, Scholarpedia is unlike anything else that has been done scientific publication. Another feature of Scholarpedia is that its authors are either invited by an editor (i.e. this letter) or elected by the public. Public election of authors ensures fairness in assigning articles to the corresponding experts in each field, and Scholarpedia will soon be transferred to an election-only regime.
I hope your schedule would allow you to contribute. If you cannot write this article, please let me know as soon as possible (by clicking one of the two links above) so that I can invite another expert, or initiate election of authors for the article.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Eugene Izhikevich, Scholarpedia Editor-in-Chief editor-in-chief@scholarpedia.org
