Scholarpedia

Scholarpedia is an English-language online wiki-based encyclopedia with features commonly associated with open-access online academic journals, which aims to have quality content.

Scholarpedia articles are written by invited expert authors and are subject to peer review. Scholarpedia lists the real names and affiliations of all authors, curators and editors involved in an article: however, the peer review process (which can suggest changes or additions, and has to be satisfied before an article can appear) is anonymous. Scholarpedia articles are stored in an online repository, and can be cited as conventional journal articles (Scholarpedia has the ISSN number 1941-6016). Scholarpedia's citation system includes support for revision numbers.

The project was created in February 2006 by Eugene M. Izhikevich, while he was a researcher at the Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, California. Izhikevich is also the encyclopedia's editor-in-chief.

Scope

Scholarpedia main page

Scholarpedia is not a general encyclopedia; it focuses on the fields of computational neuroscience, touch, dynamical systems, computational intelligence, physics and astrophysics. In April 2009, Scholarpedia amounted to 500 peer-reviewed accepted articles and about 1400 articles at diverse stages of completion.

Authorship

To ensure that the articles are written by experts, authors of the various articles in Scholarpedia are either invited by the editor-in-chief or other curators, or selected by a public election. For example, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger were nominated for the article on Wikipedia. As of May 2009, the list of authors included four Fields medalists and sixteen Nobel prize winners. Registered users must provide their full real name, and a recognised affiliation to an academic institution. Only registered users can edit an article, and those edits are subject to approval by the curator of the article, who is typically the author. Curatorship is transferrable. Users have a curator index attribute which is incremented or decremented by various activities and which affects the user's capabilities on the website.

After October 20, 2011, anyone can propose an article for Scholarpedia, but articles must be sponsored by Editors or Curators before the article can be published.

Copyright

Articles are available online without charge for non-commercial use, but may not be copied in bulk. Authors are credited on the article page.

As of January 2008, Scholarpedia changed their licensing policy and now also accepts articles under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, in addition to the earlier system in which the author gives a non-exclusive license directly to Scholarpedia.

Software

Scholarpedia uses the same wiki engine as Wikipedia, MediaWiki, with modifications to support voting on revisions. The software's development is done privately.

See also

• Citizendium
• List of Internet encyclopedias
• Nupedia – which had similar design to Scholarpedia

External links

• Official website