Open Access News

[T]he Encyclopedia of Earth [is] a new electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. The Encyclopedia is a free, fully searchable collection of articles written by scholars, professionals, educators, and experts who collaborate and review each other's work. The articles are written in non-technical language and will be useful to students, educators, scholars, professionals, as well as to the general public....

The motivation behind the Encyclopedia of Earth is simple. Go to Google and type in climate change, pesticides, nuclear power, sustainable development, or any other important environmental issue. Doing so returns millions of results, some fraction of which are authoritative. The remainder is of poor or unknown quality.

This illustrates a stark reality of the Web: digital information on the environment is characterized by an abundance of "great piles of content" and a dearth of "piles of great content." In other words, there are many resources for environmental content, but there is no central repository of authoritative information that meets the needs of diverse user communities. Our goal is to make the Encyclopedia of Earth the largest reliable information resource on the environment in history....

Content for the Encyclopedia is created, maintained, and governed by this community of experts via a specially adapted "wiki" - an online tool that allows experts to collectively add and edit web content. Unlike other, well-known wikis, such as Wikipedia, access is restricted to approved experts and all content is reviewed and approved by Topic Editors prior to being published from the wiki to this public site. Revisions to existing articles are also done on the author's wiki, and when approved they become the current version at the public site. This process produces a constantly evolving, continuously updated reference....

The Encyclopedia is a crosscutting component of the larger Earth Portal, which is a constellation of subject-specific information portals that contain news services, structured metadata, a federated environmental search engine, and other information resources. Every EoE article contains a link to its corresponding portal, and vice versa The Earth Portal is the first major portal to launch within the Digital Universe.