Journals may have the cachet of being the frontlines of academic discovery, but encyclopedias are hardly trivial, says Shawn Martin, a scholarly communications librarian at the University of Pennsylvania. It is important that well-vetted basic information on scholarly topics be publicly available — not only for undergraduates and curious Googlers, Martin says, but also to graduate assistants and professors teaching outside their specific area of expertise, who might not have time to wade through volumes of granular literature.
“There is a need to get good verifiable academic information out there,” he says, “whether it’s general or specific.”
Eugene M. Izhikevich says the answer is to make contributing a privilege. Izhikevich, a former senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, is editor-in-chief of Scholarpedia — a free, “peer-reviewed” online compendium. But unlike Britannica, Scholarpedia does not pay its experts for writing and overseeing entries.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which also does not pay its writers, has managed to work the prestige angle to mobilize a willing corps of more than 1,700 unpaid contributors.
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