Scholarpedia

Scholarpedia is a peer-reviewed open-access encyclopedia written and maintained by scholarly experts from around the world . Scholarpedia is inspired by Wikipedia and aims to complement it by providing in-depth scholarly treatment of topics within the fields of mathematics and sciences including physical, biological, behavioral, and social sciences. This hybrid model allows Scholarpedia articles to serve as a bridge between traditional peer-reviewed journals and more dynamic and up-to-date wikis without compromising quality or trustworthiness. It aims to remove the disincentives that discourage academics from participating in online publication and productive discussion on the topics they know best. Scholarpedia articles are at their best when they are concise but not abstruse; when they are accessible to advanced undergraduates familiar with the area, as well as to graduate students in adjacent fields. All published articles in Scholarpedia are first sponsored and reviewed . Each step serves a critical purpose in the development of a scholarly resource. Once published, the original identities of the authors are recorded and presented immediately beside the article title. Once an article is published, its (most) established expert becomes the article's Curator. As Curator, he or she has the final say over accepting future revisions to the article, and the ability to sponsor or review other in-progress articles. Any registered user can propose a modification of a published article, however the modification does not appear within the article until either (1) it is approved by the article Curator or until (2) it receives unanimous approval from at least two other members of the article community (if any member of the article community disagrees, the revision remains unapproved until the article Curator approves or rejects it). The article's sponsors, reviewers, and non-Curator authors automatically join the community of article contributors when the article is published. This community exists in part to relieve the Curator from needing to evaluate trivial revisions. Because the Scholarpedia system evaluates each contributor noting how often the contributor's revision judgments matched the final outcomes for each revision, to the extent that the community participates in evaluating revisions, it will imitate the Curator's judgment -- when contributors disagree too frequently with the verdicts of the Curator, they lose the ability to approve or reject future revisions. In the 13th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (published 1926), Sigmund Freud wrote "Psychoanalysis" and Albert Einstein wrote "Space-Time". Had this venerable publication employed a curatorship model, the maintenance of Freud's and Einstein's articles would today be seen as positions of honor and responsibility. The goal of Scholarpedia is to recruit today’s Einsteins and Freuds to write and maintain encyclopedic articles concerning their own fundamental discoveries. Upon approval, articles in Scholarpedia are archived in a journal (ISSN 1941-6016). They can thus be cited as any other peer-reviewed article. For example, This citation, found below the article's title, always refers to the latest approved version of the article that is shown to visitors by default. Any particular approved revision of the article can also be cited. For example, Each article maintains a permanent history of its revisions, accessible via the 'revisions' tab, providing a window into the process of review and the progress of ideas. Up until October 20, 2011, Scholarpedia relied on its editors to identify and convince the top leading experts to contribute encyclopedic articles, and on its assistant editors to help the top experts with their articles. This resulted in nearly a thousand peer-reviewed articles in the field of dynamical systems , computational neuroscience , and physics. After October 20, 2011, a second method for articles to be created was deployed, allowing anyon