Scholarpedia:Slogan

Revision as of 18:02, 12 May 2008

Scholarpedia needs a new slogan, since the word "free" is often misunderstood by the invited authors and other users, and it may even have the opposite effect (like we are trying to sell something).

Candidates

1. "Scholarpedia - the open access encyclopedia"

2. "Scholarpedia - the peer-reviewed encyclopedia"

3. "Scholarpedia - the open-access peer-reviewed encyclopedia".

4. "Scholarpedia - the open-access encyclopedia for scientists".

Discussion

Candidate 3 is the most accurate, but it is too long and cumbersome. The peer-reviewed aspect is important, so candidate 2 makes sense to me. However, this would amount of removing the word "free" from what we have right now and some might think that Scholarpedia went "commercial". Izhikevich

Append your thoughts here (in chronological order):

Open-access is important and is the agreed term for academic material (e.g. journal articles) that is freely available on the web. If you want to avoid the ambiguity of the word "free" then I think you need "open-access" to be clear to people that S'pedia is not going to be (now or ever) subscription only. Unfortunately I don't think that 1 adequately distinguishes S'pedia from Wikipedia which is also open access. We need to get across the idea that S'pedia articles are also written and managed by noted authorities, and we need to do this without sounding elitist. Peer-reviewed seems to capture this, though in a rather unexciting way, so at the moment I can't think of anything better than 4 and would argue that we go for that. - Tony Prescott

The peer-reviewed encyclopedia sounds good to me. The owl was also the symbol of Athena (as the goddess of wisdom). - Jean-Jacques Slotine .

I added option 4. If you mention that the audience is meant to be scientists, then they can discover later on that this is peer-reviewed. -Paul Katz