Scholarly Community Encyclopedia

We have added an entry for VEGFs to the Scholarly Community Encyclopedia. I do not know more about the project than is available from their About page. The service is backed by the MDPI publisher, the entries are mostly created in association with and based on articles published in MDPI journals. You can create different types of entries: Topic reviews, biographies and "others", but all entries I have seen are topic reviews derived from articles in MDPI journals.

I do not see which niche this encyclopedia is aiming to fill. Even though many entries are based on peer-reviewed articles, there is no peer-review of the entries themselves, and - not surprisingly - the encyclopedia contains quite a few questionable entries. However, unlike e.g. in Wikipedia, there is no established community of crowd-sourced quality control. However, when modifications are done to an entry, the original authors are notified. However, I do not know how editing wars (which have been e.g. quite common for controversial Wikipedia entries) would get resolved in this system. MDPI states that all authors are highly qualified experts, but in reality, everybody can create an account and edit existing entries. MDPI tries to incentivise the creation of entries with discounts on their article processing charges (APCs) via a point system. However, the ephemeral character of the point system does arguably not create sufficient incentive for high profile researchers or for researchers from developed countries that have mostly sufficient financial resources to pay for APCs.

MDPI has also an associated service for scientists called "SciProfiles", which - similar to Mendeley, ResearchGate, ORCID, Publons, Google Scholar, Loop, and many others - hosts researcher profiles. However, unlike most of the other services, SciProfiles is only visible to members, which makes it pretty useless imho.