Scholarly Communication Issues

According to their main page, Scholarpedia works on the same technology as its popular counterpart amateur encyclopedia, allowing writers to modify and add articles to the collection with a few simple steps. Unlike Wikipedia though, each article is contributed by a field expert, who is either invited or elected by a public poll, and then anonymously peer reviewed for accuracy and authentication. All modifications to an article must be approved by the author, who acts as a curator for the article and is held primarily responsible for its content.
This offers not only an opportunity for grand variety in individualized and scholarly reviewed information sharing, like in Institutional Repositories, but also makes way for current and timely updates via the open source network of experts working together. One must ask the question, though, why reinvent the wheel?
Wikipedia is readily available for scholars and experts and their vast expanse of knowledge. If they adopted this popular venue, they would reach a greater audience and the dissemination of information would spread to amateur and inspiring scholars who may bring a different perspective on studies and research than the traditional and academic.
There could be two reasons why Scholarpedia has opened its own venue rather than adding to the large compendium readily available. Firstly, the authors could be focused on preserving peer review as a means of professional advancement in an open source environment than traditional expensive scholarly publications. While Institutional Repositories could provide one such venue, Scholarpedia is more global, touching experts from all over the world.
Alternately, Scholarpedia could be seen as a branch off of the Wikipedia trunk, which hosts four particular subcollections- Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems, Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence and Encyclopedia of Astrophysics. On its homepage, it claims to not be a rival of Wikipedia, but rather a complementary source.
Whether it can be seen as the experts' answer to the open source authority question or simply a special collection within the larger scheme of the on-line "encyclopedia", Scholarpedia offers academics and educators an opportunity to authorize information published electronically. Perhaps one day, the Internet will be considered a mostly trustworthy source with Scholarpedia leading the trend.

- posted by Christi Underdown IS 560