Scholarpedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Scholarpedia is an English-language online wiki-based encyclopedia in which articles are written by invited expert authors and are subject to peer review.^[1] The articles are available online without charge for non-commercial use, but may not be copied in bulk. Authors are given credit on the article page.

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. Users have a scholar index attribute which is incremented or decremented by various activities and which controls what capabilities the user has. The web site uses the MediaWiki software which is also used by Wikipedia.

Scholarpedia is at this time not a general encyclopedia; it currently focuses on the fields of computational neuroscience, dynamical systems, computational intelligence, and astrophysics.^[2]

The project was created in February 2006 by Eugene M. Izhikevich, a researcher at the Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, California.

Scholarpedia conducts election of authors for various articles to identify the original inventors/discoverers. For example, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger were nominated for the article on Wikipedia.

1 Copyright and patents
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Copyright and patents

Contributors retain copyright on articles submitted to Scholarpedia, and agree to that Scholarpedia has the unlimited right to reproduce their submissions. This approach has been criticised by Brian Mingus of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who has suggested that the GNU Free Documentation License is more appropriate for a volunteer project, and would allow text to be incorporated to and from other projects such as Wikipedia. Mingus also criticised the application for a patent on the Scholarpedia methodology, noting that the system was built on the MediaWiki software, which is licensed under the GPL, and that the modifications could be released as open source software rather than being kept closed.^[3]

Scholarpedia have responded, saying that it is important that only they can reproduce contributed text as it gives original authors control over use of their contributions, and that the right to reproduce assigned to Scholarpedia means that the rights can be licensed to publishers, like MIT Press and Springer, to produce printed versions of Scholarpedia.^{[citation needed]}