According to Wikipedia, Encyclopedia is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge either from all branches or from a particular field or discipline ^[1]. Ideally the authors are experts with profound understanding of the topics and peer reviewed. We planned to launch a scholarly online encyclopedia 10 years ago where scholars and experts with their identities verified and registered in our sciprofiles.com take the responsibilities as authors to write the entries and the papers are reviewed and quality controlled by peers. For scholars, this encyclopedia will be complementary to the very successful Wikipedia. Now we are ready to start.

Encyclopedia (ISSN 2309-3366) is a multidisciplinary open access journal that records high-quality entries in encyclopedia format in all research fields. All submitted entries should be peer reviewed before publication online. We launched a user-generated content platform of the same name in 2018 for the scholarly community ^[2]. Encyclopedia journal publish the final version in a formal way of all original entries with an official DOI. It aims to provide benchmark information for researchers as well as the general public interested in accurate and trusted knowledge on specific topics.

We encourage authors to either create entries at encyclopedia.pub or submit the paper in its final version in encyclopedia style to this journal directly on topics in which they have knowledge and expertise. Authors may also edit the entry content based on their published papers according to the requirement of an encyclopedia article. Unlike a review paper or research article, there is no request on the novelty or innovativeness on entries published in the Encyclopedia journal. Instead, all entries published here should be significant to the field and scientifically sound and mature results and achievements. Entry papers should be specific on a certain topic which includes but is not limited to: the research topic, definition or introduction to a scientific concept, hypothesis, protocol, biography for scholars/research institutes or universities, or interesting videos/images. Furthermore, we will also release our Encyclopedia printed volumes in future once there are enough entries on a topic or field.

For well-prepared entries on the Encyclopedia platform encyclopedia.pub [2], authors could apply for publication with an official DOI in the Encyclopedia journal once they have received more than two comments from other scholars to support the publication. The final decision on the Encyclopedia journal would be based on all comments from both open peer reviewing on the platform encyclopedia.pub and single-blind peer reviewing moderated by our in-house editors. At the same time, we also encourage authors to announce the entries on the Encyclopedia platform encyclopedia.pub for open peer reviewing based on all online manuscript submissions, made directly to the Encyclopedia journal at susy.mdpi.com.

Encyclopedia from MDPI at encyclopedia.pub in the format similar to Wikipedia and here in a periodical journal publication is an open access knowledge sharing project. We plan to offer free publications at least during the first two years or remain free both for readers and authors as long as MDPI has enough financial resources to support.