Scholarpedia:Invitation to condensed matter
Dear %NAME%,
As editors of Scholarpedia, the peer-reviewed open-access encyclopedia of the international scholars' community, we would like to invite you to write the entry "%TITLE%" for our encyclopedia. (The final title of the article and its contents can be changed.)
The main goal of Scholarpedia is to become a high-quality online encyclopedic reference for the community of scholars. To achieve this target, we invite world--acknowledged experts in each topic. In the appendix you will find more detailed information on Scholarpedia: its unique features, its high quality standards as evident from authors, which presently include 15 Nobel-prize winners, 3 Fields medalists, 9 (ICTP) Dirac medalists, 13 Heineman prize winners, and hundreds of world leaders in their scientific fields. Scholarpedia is free for authors and readers.
The condensed matter theory part of scholarpedia only just got started but already features nice pedagogical articles by world experts and pedagogs. For example, Shankar's article on RG for fermions, Albert Fert 's contribution on giant magnetoresistance, John Goodenough's article on the Kanamori-Goodeonough rules, Martin Gutzwiller's article on Gutzwiller wave function, Alex Hewson's article on the Kondo effect and Leon Cooper contribution on the BCS theory of superconductivity. Many exciting articles are forthcoming. For example, TV Ramakrishnan's on Anderson Localization, Frank Steglich will introduce heavy fermions, Subir Sachdev will write about quantum critical phenomena.
We know your schedule is very busy. Scholarpedia is not obsessed by deadlines, just by articles/authors' quality. If you accept the invitation you will be asked to fix a self-imposed deadline (up to t+12 months) which you will anyway be able to modify and extend as needed. There is also flexibility about the length of the article (from 2 to 15 pages). You can invite additional co-authors (main collaborators or younger researchers) to help you in the writing task.
If you accept this invitation, after reviewers' approval, the article will be published on our free on-line journal (ISSN 1941-6016 by the Library of Congress, USA) and will be citable like eg %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 contacting us.
We truly hope you will accept this invitation; in any case thanks 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
Gabriel Kotliar Department of Physics and Astronomy Rutgers University
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APPENDIX: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARPEDIA
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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 no author is payed for his work. Scholarpedia is maintained by the community of scholars, mainly on a volunteer basis. All kind of legal economical support is welcome to let Scholarpedia survive [2].
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 ). That is why sometimes we make external links to some help pages in Wikipedia.
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 fist 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 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 of being curators of these articles. The ideal 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. 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.
Author's elections
In Scholarpedia authors are either invited by editors or publicly elected by the community of scholars. Public election of authors ensures fairness in assigning articles to the most appropriate expert in each field, expecially for topics which do not have clear "original inventors or discoverers". [3]
The ideal article in Scholarpedia
The ideal article of Scholarpedia fulfills two challenging requirements: (1) it is written in clear concise and pedagogical style, as appropriate at least for graduate students; (2) 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 is sized from 2 to 15 pages and in any case should be less than 50 KBytes all figures, equations, tables... included. It is up to your taste to decide among the following possibilities: A) write a single--page article, B) write an article with a main page and as many subpages (appendixes) as needed, C) split your contribution in a set of self consistent articles of previous types.
About the Encyclopedia of Physics
The "Encyclopedia of Physics" is a young Scholarpedia project started in June 2008.
Among its articles you can find:
- Arnowitt-Deser-Misner formalism by Stanley Deser [4]
- Attractor by John W. Milnor [5]
- Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin symmetry by Carlo M. Becchi and Camillo Imbimbo [6]
- Bekenstein bound by Jacob D. Bekenstein [7]
- Chaotic hypothesis by Giovanni Gallavotti [8]
- Cosmic X-ray sources by Riccardo Giacconi and Piero Rosati [9]
- Cosmic background explorer by John C. Mather and Gary F Hinshaw [10]
- Gauge theories by Gerard 't Hooft [11]
- Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation by Gino Biondini and Dmitry Pelinovsky [12]
- Richtmyer-Meshkov instability and re-accelerated inhomogeneous flows by Oleg Schilling and Jeffrey W. Jacobs [13]
- Slavnov-Taylor identities by Andrei A. Slavnov [14]
For more updated information see http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Encyclopedia_of_physics.
Your article
If you accept our invitation, your article will be peer-reviewed and freely available online after his completion. After its approval, the article will be archived in Scholarpedia's free online journal (ISSN 1941-6016 by the Library of Congress, USA) [15] and it will be cited like eg "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. Curatorship task typically takes less than one hour per year; in any case curator is free to resign at any moment (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 take care of the article on the long run.
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 universally-acknowledged authority of the field. To submit suggestions, please follow 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 anyway allows for writing equations in LaTeX2e (with AMS-LaTeX package). An average Latex user can learn how to write an article in few hours.
IMPORTANT REMARK: If you feel you cannot deal with wikitext consider having a young co-author to help you in this task. In any case do not give up for this reason: we have a few (just a few!) assistant editors (volunteer students) that will be happy to help you in the task.
More information
A basic visual help explaining how to log-in and more 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
