Scholarpedia

January 12, 2007 on 10:53 am | In Books and Encyclopedias |

…And now there’s Scholarpedia , which combines Wikipedia’s open-source principles with a healthy dash of peer review.

Scholarpedia looks almost exactly like the pioneering site that inspired it, but it has a much more rigid hierarchy: All the articles on the site are written by scholars who are either invited by Scholarpedia directors or elected by the public. The articles are anonymously peer reviewed and placed under the charge of “curators” — experts who are often the articles’ authors — who must approve any additions or edits.

For now Scholarpedia is restricting itself to articles on neuroscience and computational intelligence. “The approach of Scholarpedia does not compete with but rather complements that of Wikipedia,” writes Eugene M. Izhikevich, a senior fellow in theoretical neurobiology at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, who is the site’s editor in chief. “Instead of covering a broad range of topics, Scholarpedia covers a few narrow fields, but does that exhaustively.” more