Scholarpedia:2012 Brain Corporation Prize in Computational Neuroscience

The Winners

The award ceremony of Brain Corporation Prize in Computational Neuroscience was held at the Computational Neuroscience (CNS'13) meeting in Paris on July 16, 16:10.

• First Place (426 G+1): Alex H Williams et al. (2013) Homeostatic Regulation of Neuronal Excitability. Scholarpedia, 8(1):1656.

• Second Place (408 G+1): Thomas Kreuz (2012) SPIKE-distance. Scholarpedia, 7(12):30652.

• Third Place (314 G+1): Zhe Chen and Emery N. Brown (2013) State space model. Scholarpedia, 8(3):30868.

The Prize

Current and aspiring computational neuroscientists: you are invited to participate in a global experiment in scholarship and collaboration. Scholarpedia, with funding from Brain Corporation, would like to develop as a public resource the world's most open, comprehensive, current, and scholarly computational neuroscience encyclopedia.

To this end, Brain Corporation is offering $10,000 (US) in prizes for writing and publishing the most popular reviews on topics in this field. As a Scholarpedia entry, each article will, prior to publication, undergo normal vetting and peer-review. Only after an article is published will it be eligible to begin receiving votes.

Once the article is published, it will be made publicly available at Scholarpedia under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

How it works

1. Join the Google Group.
2. Pick a topic within the field of computational neuroscience (note: topics within only computer science or only neuroscience are not eligible).
3. If you are not already an established expert on the topic, persuade such an individual to join your team and serve as the article's established expert.
4. If you haven't done so already, sign up for a Scholarpedia account, formally propose your article, enroll it in the competition by adding the text [[Category:Brain Corporation Prize 2012]], and invite your co-authors.
5. Once your team has been assembled, find a Scholarpedia Curator or Editor to act as the article-team Sponsor.
6. Write!
7. Once you have completed a final draft, you can either invite existing Scholarpedia Curators to review your article, or you can find a Scholarpedia Editor, who will be able to invite external reviewers for you.
8. After your article has received approval from at least two reviewers, the article's established expert approves the final version of the article after the expiration of the one week cool down period.
9. Once the article is published, promote it to friends and colleagues and get them to vote for it using Google +1 !

The article team that receives the most +1 votes by June 30, 2013 will receive a $5,000 prize. Second and third place prizes of $3,000 and $2,000 will also be awarded based on number of Google +1 votes.

Official contest rules

1. Start: The contest begins October 1, 2012.
2. Deadline: the contest ends and all votes will be counted at 23:59 Pacific Time, June 30th, 2013.
3. Eligibility: participation is unrestricted.
4. Only one article per topic will be considered. Topics should be reserved prior to writing via the article sponsorship process.
5. Topics must be directly relevant to the field of computational neuroscience. These are subjects that lie at the intersection of neuroscience and {math, computer science, physics}.
6. Articles must be written in English.
7. Articles cannot have already been published prior to the start of this competition.
8. Articles must have their competition participation noted. Included within the article text must be the following: [[Category:Brain Corporation Prize 2012]]
9. Winning criteria:
   1. The eligible article with the most votes at time of contest end will be named the winner.
   2. Article voting will occur via the Google +1 button (available at the top right of every published article).
10. In the event of a two-way tie for first place, each winner will be awarded $4000 (USD). In a three way tie, each winner will be awarded $3333 (USD). In a two way tie for second place, each winner will be awarded $2,500 (USD).
11. Scholarpedia reserves the right to delay the contest deadline. Announcement of any such change will be made on this page and on the contest mailing list. At least seven days notice will be given of any such change.
12. Winners will be announced one week after closing of the contest.
13. Scholarpedia reserves the right to disqualify any individuals or articles at any time. The intent here is to discourage and prevent vote manipulation or other kinds of cheating or otherwise bad faith contest participation. Dishonest contest behavior will not be tolerated.

Article guidelines

As entries in an encyclopedia, Scholarpedia articles are to be written in "classic style" (as described in "Clear and Simple as the Truth" by Thomas & Turner, 1994, Princeton University Press). The writing must withstand the test of time, and continue to read well in spite of a change in the person responsible for the article's content (e.g., the grammatical first-person and second person must be avoided).

Furthermore,

• While Scholarpedia aims to be accessible to a wide audience, content should be sufficiently comprehensive as to be informative for those in fields relevant to the topic of a given article. As a general rule, articles should be targeted to advanced undergraduate students studying in the article’s area or graduate students in related areas.
• Authors should attempt to anticipate common questions a reader might ask about a topic (e.g., for an invention: who invented it, when, where, why, and how? What did the invention replace? What was its impact? Has it led to any notable successes or failures?). Notice that, e.g., Wikipedia articles are generally very successful in this regard.
• Articles here should reflect expert consensus, mentioning any and all widely accepted alternative perspectives on issues of controversy.
• Articles must explain only the terms unique to the article or not appropriately explained elsewhere, and in all other cases use hyperlinks for the definition of other terms. For instance, the Scholarpedia article on Bursting does not explain concepts such as neurons, spikes, currents, and bifurcations, but links to other articles for their definition.
• Avoid using abbreviations, as it worsens readability can make it more difficult for readers to find the article via Google and other search engines.
• Articles should be as concise as possible. Good articles are between 2,000 and 4,000 words, excluding references and figure captions.

Further guidance is available from the Scholarpedia article style guide

Ten reasons to participate, irrespective of the prize

1. Help discover what works in scholarly collaboration — participate in a global experiment on the future of scholarly research.
2. Add a peer-reviewed article to your C.V.
3. Support open-access publishing.
4. Help the public — provide to the world an accurate article on a topic of importance to you.
5. For posterity — be the author of a review that will be useful for decades to come.
6. To support interdisciplinary research — encourage others to participate in compiling a free, current, and scholarly online resource.
7. To see your work appear in a normal Google search — your article will likely appear within the top five search results when its topic is queried.
8. For Curatorship — become a topic Curator, and help ensure that the world has trustworthy information available to them on a topic of your expertise.
9. To accelerate research — help science and scholarship advance more quickly by providing an easily accessible and updatable review.
10. To promote scholarly information online — help resist the glut of redundant and generic online “content” with a substantive, thoughtful, and enduring contribution.

See also

10 reasons to join Brain Corporation