
Ask HN: Best way to publish papers as a non-scholar? - MartianSquirrel
Is there a way someone who is not a PhD can publish papers without being marginalized by the community?<p>Do you have any advice on how to write better quality articles?
======
cultus
As a recovering academic, I believe it would be good to examine _why_ you want
to publish in an academic journal. Are you a consultant, for example, and you
think it help you get clients? Are you trying to get a better job and you
think the paper would help your resume? Or do you just want to increase the
sum of human knowledge?

Peer review is a highly flawed process that has an empirically small effect on
paper quality [0]. Moreso, rejection of an article is a poor or completely
useless predictor of the ultimate impact of the article if it is published.

Getting a paper through peer review is slow and frustrating. You may get
reviewers who reject a paper for incorrect or even bizarre reasons. If your
paper casts doubts on an anonymous reviewer's work, you are going to have a
hard time. It's just not fun.

What are the benefits? Tech employers generally don't care about publications,
just the work involved. Clients probably don't care. NGOs and government don't
care either. The only people who care whether something is published are
academics, in my experience.

Perhaps you are in an industry where this isn't true, in which case you might
have more incentive. But don't assume people will care.

You might have a microscopic chance of your paper becoming highly cited, but
without a well-know co-author, that is unlikely even if your paper has
important content. Most scientific papers fail to make any kind of splash,
with numbers of readers numbering in literally the low dozens. After all that
work, chances are that nobody would care.

A better solution is to put it all on a blog, and/or ArXiV or one of the other
preprint services for other subjects. That way your research will be available
unpaywalled for anyone.

[0]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586872/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586872/)

~~~
xamuel
Not OP, but I'm a former academic still doing research, and I appreciate peer
review as gatekeeper. When I was younger, I wrote a lot of garbage on a blog
that I wish had been better filtered. Worst case, if I publish a paper and it
turns out to be garbage, I can pin the blame on the journal.

I find it especially important if the paper has any danger of being perceived
as crackpot material. For example, my paper "A type of simulation which some
experimental evidence suggests we don't live in" [1], recently featured on the
HN frontpage, took years to prepare and finally publish, even though it's
literally less than one page in the journal. With something as 'pop' as
whether we live in a simulation, I wanted to be sure what I wasn't just
deceiving myself or something.

[1]
[https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf](https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf)

~~~
cultus
Traditional peer review can filter out complete crackpot garbage, but it
empirically is not effective at improving paper quality. Just because it may
have filtered out some wrong things you said does not mean it is effective at
it in general.

Open, non-anonymous comments on preprint services hold much more promise. Peer
review without anonymous gatekeepers.

~~~
xamuel
I've had papers greatly improved by peer review. Maybe mathematics is an
outlier. All my best papers were significantly informed by reviewers.

I've had cases where my initial thought was "this reviewer is an idiot!!!"
When I calmed down and forced myself to give them the benefit of the doubt, I
ended up realizing they were right, and they improved my papers.

------
hprotagonist
(edit: my publication experiences are heavily biased towards
biotech/biomedical/natural sciences fields. Your CS Experience May Vary,
particularly w/r/t the prestige of conference papers.)

The obvious answer that you might not like very much is "write a paper and co-
author it with an established group." If you share a lede with an established
group, that's immediate credibility.

Journals happily accept manuscripts from first/corresponding authors who don't
have PhDs. Graduate students publish regularly; depending on your program this
is effectively obligatory.

Self-funding publication in a peer-reviewed journal will raise eyebrows -- so
see my first suggestion, which offloads the often substantial publication
costs onto a grant. (Our group's last publication cost was ~$4500, for a
benchmark. That's higher than normal but it was open access with 6 color
figures). Crediting a grant for the work also lends credibility; someone gave
you cash to do this thing, so obviously they don't think you're totally nuts.

Publishing preprint-only on the arxiv is well established. I think you need
someone to vouch for you the first time, but that shouldn't be too hard
depending on the field.

Depending on the field, single-author maunscripts are either basically normal
(parts of CS, much of mathematics, some theoretical physics), a giant red flag
(experimental physics, biology-adjacent fields), or somewhere in between
(economics?).

Do not ever use a vanity publisher for scientific articles. If the journal
ever appeared in Beall's list, run, because it's a mark of shame.

Finally, don't necessarily attribute your marginalization to not having a PhD
-- the politics of publication are ruthless no matter who you are.

~~~
eslaught
I don't know about where you publish, but all the venues where I publish use
double blind review. Therefore I'd say all this talk about how many authors
and so on is a red herring.

Assuming double blind review, the barriers are going to be with respect to the
contribution itself, or the writing. For a paper to get accepted in my field
(CS, HPC, PL, compilers), first of all it needs to present a novel and
interesting contribution. I occasionally see papers that are pretty obviously
coming from industry where it's pretty apparent that the authors just have no
idea what a contribution entails.

This is the sort of thing that you grow to just have a gut sense of by doing a
PhD. Short of that, you could get some of this sense yourself by reading
papers, though it would be far easier to collaborate with someone experienced
in the field you can find a person who is willing.

~~~
pygy_
> all the venues where I publish use double blind review.

But you still need to have your paper sent for review... Couldn't the editor
reject it outright?

~~~
eslaught
Perhaps this is an issue in journal based publishing, I don't know.

In CS, we publish in conferences. Conferences don't have editors in the sense
that journals have. So there's no initial filtering step. Anyone can submit,
and anything that gets submitted will be read by at least 3 or 4 reviewers
(who don't get to see the author list). Anyone who does get to see the author
list (e.g. the program committee chair) is not involved in any decision making
about specific papers unless there is a very serious violation of some kind
(which in practice happens very, very infrequently).

~~~
xamuel
>anything that gets submitted will by read by at least 3 or 4 reviewers

Note to self: open a lucrative business submitting bulk spam to CS
conferences! (Just kidding)

~~~
PeterisP
How would such spam result in anything lucrative?

~~~
pygy_
Sell conferences a spam filter?

------
ananya_muddu
I am a computer systems scientist and have participated in several peer-review
processes.

I have never seen a case where an author who does not have researcher
credentials is marginalized.

However, papers with bad science are rejected and in the worst-case, the
authors are blacklisted. It does not matter if the authors have stellar
credentials or none to start with. So aim to write papers with good science
and forever stop worrying about getting marginalized.

There are several books that explain bad science. I recommend "Craft of
Research", "They Say I Say", and "Demon Haunted World" to start with.

The most effective method to get your paper accepted is to make the
experimental methods explicit and the data public. This will make your paper
much more scientific than those published in conferences with poor-
reproducibility checks.

Professors are hungry to write good papers. Conaact a professor who works in
the same community to review your paper in return for co-authorship. They will
gladly agree if your paper is aligned with their interests.

All the best!

------
ska
There is nothing magical about having a PhD of course. I've reviewed a few
papers (for journals) from non-traditional sources, and also had some more
direct submissions. The common issues you run into are

    
    
      1) The work is sloppy and/or has obvious errors.
      2) The work lacks clear context (i.e. citations and framing - "why should we care").
      3) The structure is not idiomatic.
      4) The writing is not idiomatic.
    

The 1st one is an easy rejection, but the next 3 are harder. If you are
submitting through conventional editorial boards, you have to understand how
much unpaid work it is to do a good review. If your paper is difficult to
place in context, it's harder. If it is done in a non-idiomatic way it is both
harder to understand, and - fair or not - reduces confidence (which means more
detailed verification needed).

I agree having a "traditional" collaborator can help, not because of the
credentials so much as avoiding issues 2-3. It also will help to read a large
number of well written articles. At minimum, if you are thinking of publishing
your own ideas you should have read every core/significant related paper done
in the last decade or so, and as many of the other related ones you find
interesting as you can. That will help you with both issue #2 and with
improving quality.

If it's in an area with an active preprint server like arxiv, by all means
submit there. If your idea is interesting and you've called it out well, you
should get some feedback.

------
shipdog
Created an account just to respond to this. This might not be the answer you
want to hear but my 2c would be blog. The internet is great publish your own
stuff. Why should you care about being marginalized by a community who mostly
plagiarize off each other and only think within the limits of what others
allow them to think. The same people are the one's who never allow
breakthroughs and call anything but incremental improvements pop science. Do
things for yourself, for the human spirit. Stop worrying what others think
about you. They don't think about you. There's nothing sad in that, it's
actually liberating you are free to share and write and create how you want.
If you want recognition you've failed before you start.

On writing better articles my advice is to simply start with the end in mind.
Explain the idea how you would to a child without using childish language.
Leave the thesaurus aside, don't use industry language just cause you have to.
Don't not use it just cause you think you'll sound pretentious.

Hope that helps, hopefully I don't come off sounding like a knob. Good luck.

~~~
qqn
This was my favourite answer.

------
gervase
I think this really depends on your motivations. Are you trying to convey the
information to the community? Trying to build a reputation as a researcher?
Increment your citation count?

arXiv is a pretty good option for disseminating information, but most papers
published there don't receive as much consideration as those that have gone
through a peer review. Therefore, only the most obviously-groundbreaking
papers end up accruing a lot of citations there.

If you want to build a reputation, you'll need to target peer-reviewed
conferences, and probably those that have a double-blinded process. This will
allow your work to stand on its own, although you'll need to ensure that it
conforms to the structures/patterns/shibboleths of the academic community.
They best way to learn these, if you don't already know them, is to read as
many papers as you have time for in a domain as close to yours as possible,
and then replicate those formats.

If you're looking to increase your citation count, this is difficult to do
without really groundbreaking research. Some manage it by doing "citation
sharing" with collaborators, but this is (A) frowned upon, and (B) difficult
to get going if you're not in academia.

In any case, you'll probably want to learn LaTeX if you haven't already; this
is a pretty necessary first step for publication, either at arXiv or an
IEEE/ACM conference. Edit: This is because most conferences have a template
that you must follow, and these templates are provided in LaTeX format.

------
shoguning
I would just put it on arXiv, or equivalents like biorXiv. You should read a
lot of papers in the field and cite the relevant ones. Also, use conventions
of the field--LaTeX two column format is frequently used in CS/ML papers.

In my PhD I put some work on biorXiv that I never bothered to put through peer
review and was pleasantly surprised to see it cited by a peer-reviewed journal
article.

~~~
joeberon
Don't you need to be endorsed to post on the archive?
[https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement](https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement)

~~~
mooneater
I thought that as well, I would like to hear if its true in practice for arxiv

~~~
xamuel
Not only do outsiders need endorsement, even if you get one, the arxiv is
curated. I don't know why people assume it's just totally wide open like any
random person can publish anything to it? It would be inundated with junk!

If you're a member of a recognized academic institution (as determined by
email address I think?) then you can skip the endorsement step.

------
rubidium
Re: "any advice on how to write better quality articles"

My route to learning how to write quality papers: Find an expert in your field
to tear your paper apart, and then get to work rebuilding it. Rinse and repeat
20 or so times. Additional experiments may be needed. You'll probably have a
good paper at the end.

This of course is much easier to do in grad school. But can be achieved
elsewhere.

------
afandian
Things like blog posts are playing an increasingly large part in scholarship.
Granted, it's not part of the 'traditional' peer-reviewed journals publishing
process, but there's lots of change afoot (e.g. open access, post-publication
peer review, preprints etc).

One thing you can do is make sure you're still on the map. This could include,
for example, making sure Crossref tracks your blog so we can record citations
/ references _from_ your work _to_ other work. Our service for tracking non-
traditional publications, Event Data, is still in beta, but you could add your
blog to the list:

[https://github.com/crossref/event-data-
enquiries](https://github.com/crossref/event-data-enquiries)

[http://www.crossref.org/services/event-
data](http://www.crossref.org/services/event-data)

You could also publish your article on FigShare, which means it will get a DOI
and thereby be more easily citable by others.

If you hadn't guessed, I'm an employee of Crossref.

------
sevensor
Make sure you understand how a journal article is expected to be structured.
This varies from field to field. In my field (not CS), it looks like this:

1\. Introduction. This not only lays out the problem you're addressing, but
also locates it in the context of previous work. This is important for a few
reasons, not least that the people reviewing your paper will probably expect
you to have cited them there. But also, it shows that you understand your work
in the context of a broader scholarly effort to advance your field. If you
think your work is truly novel, you probably haven't done enough reading to
find parallels in the literature. The introduction should also briefly state
your results -- this isn't a mystery novel, you're not saving up for a big
reveal.

2\. Methods. This section describes the new thing you did or made. What it is,
how it works and why. You're still going to be putting a fair number of
citations in here, but they'll be a good deal more focused than in the intro.
Often I see people citing their own research group's previous work here,
because you're building on something the group already did.

3\. Experiment. This section describes what you did to evaluate your work.
This description should be detailed enough that somebody else should be able
to repeat your measurements.

4\. Results. This section should have the most figures and the fewest
citations in it. It describes what happened when you did your experiment.

5\. Conclusion. Here you explain what it all means and how it ties back to the
broader scholarly effort to advance your field. Where the intro states your
results, the conclusion restates them and puts them into context. The
conclusion also usually talks about future research directions suggested by
the work you've presented.

A lot of grad school is about learning how to write papers like this.

------
pepijndevos
How would you compare a blog to a paper? I personally read just about as much
papers as blog posts, with both containing valuable information and important
ideas. I have my own blog, but I'm currently sitting on some ideas that could
maybe... maybe be a paper. Sure, peer-review is nice, but how many people are
going to read about my idea as a blog post, vs in a (pay-walled?) journal. I'm
inclined to think that outside academia, a blog post may actually have a
bigger reach. The paper has more bragging rights maybe though.

------
wsy
Taking the following steps should help:

1\. If you imagine the knowledge in your field as mountains (like the Rocky
Mountains, or the Alps), then you need to describe very clearly where exactly
your contribution is located. Which summit do you elevate further? What are
the neighborhood summits (alternatives to your solution)? Pointing this out in
the introduction shows the reader that you are part of the community. It
doesn't matter then that you have no formal academic position.

2\. Choose the venue wisely. There are two factors to consider: a) it makes
sense to publish where the work you build on and/or compete with was already
published. You know these venues if you have done step 1. Some authors of your
'neighborhood' papers will probably be your reviewers. b) if you think that
you have a significant contribution, select a tier-1 venue to maximize impact;
if you think you have a minor contribution, it makes more sense to go for tier
2. Seek advice by a researcher in your field which journals and/or conferences
in your field belong to which tier, and ask them for their opinion which venue
would be suitable.

3\. When you have chosen your preferred journal/conference, identify the 10
most-cited papers from the past 5 years, and carefully analyze their structure
and the used methods. Use them as role models for your own paper, together
with your 'neighborhood' papers from step 1.

4\. Your paper will likely be rejected initially. Read the reviews carefully.
Some reviewers are crappy and just "don't like" your work, but many reviewers
raise helpful and constructive points. And even the crappy reviews give you
hints on how the community works, so you can revise your paper and try again
somewhere else (or the next year, for a conference). Don't give up quickly,
but also expect that you will have to invest significant effort on
improvements.

My experience is about publishing in CS, not sure if my suggestions would also
apply to other sciences.

------
dlo
A couple of suggestions.

\- Many conferences use blind peer-review.

\- After you've finished up with the work, you can ask a PhD to provide
feedback/editing in exchange for co-authorship.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
For the last point, never put your name on a paper that isn’t yours, even if
you help out with the editing. It isn’t your works, if someone asks you about
it later it will be awkward. That isn’t even mentioning that the quality of
the work still might not be up to your own standard. The only case where this
doesn’t apply is adviser-student relationships, but in that case the adviser
should really be more than just an editor.

------
honorious
I have reviewed and published several papers for conferences in Computer
Science. You got good suggestions so far, I'd like to add one important thing:

* Choose and Know your community!

When you choose a venue like a conference, you are writing an article with the
intent of being read by a very specific subset of the research community. You
can imagine each subgroup having a set of "interesting conversations" around a
narrow set of topics or methodology that are deemed important by the
community.

So ... you have to convince your audience that you are contributing something
to their conversation. Go look up papers in the previous edition of the
conference, dig into their references, and frame your contribution in the term
of the conversation they are having. In this way it'll be easier for everybody
reading the paper to understand what you are doing.

In some cases, it might be that you are telling the community that they should
care about this new problem of yours, but if it is completely unrelated to
their discussion, it'll be an harder sell.

Also, be aware of the style of the community: are they interested in
experiments backed by strong theoretical work? Or are they more interested in
practical experiences, without caring much about theory? A decent paper
accepted in a theoretical conference might actually be rejected by a more
practical conference (and the other way around).

------
stewbrew
It probably depends on the community and the journal but I was a reviewer for
a journal (not blinded, not CS) and in my experience a good paper is
everything, credentials are nothing. I read quite a few papers from university
bprofessors who had hardly a clue of statistics and research design and didn't
care to ask an statistician and submitted shitty papers and were rejected. As
a reviewer, I was really happy when I got to read a well written paper with no
really obvious flaws.

------
sqrt17
Let's define here "being a scholar" as having a good sense of where your field
is (and for anything people are interested in, there _is_ a field).

The standard way is that PhD students (often non-scholars) team up with more
senior, well-read researchers (i.e. experienced scholars), with the latter at
a minimum explaining and framing the work and in many cases guiding and
shaping it.

You get marginalized by the community for bad scholarship just as proposing
crappy conference talks will lead to "marginalization" by the conference
organizers: there's already so much content to consume, and scholarship and
other requirements serve to shape and organize people's contributions in a way
that means the community as a whole can make progress.

As for advice on how to write better: Read a lot. Get rejected a lot and learn
to read between the lines. If you want a friendlier environment, aim for
workshops rather than major conferences. Don't be afraid of putting in the
work that's necessary for a good paper.

------
pelario
I think the answer may change a lot depending on which field are you thinking
about; because "the community" will be quite different as well.

Regarding "how to write better quality articles?" one key part is reading a
lot of high quality articles from the field. Of course, there are other things
yo may want to do, but again, it will depend on the area.

------
evanwarfel
Other than closely reading the literature that informs what you are writing
about, one way to write better quality papers is to reach out to the relevant
academic researchers and engage with them. If they are interested in your
ideas, they might be open to giving you their feedback. It's also impossible
to write in a vacuum. I'm friends with a few people who were grad students
when I met them, and are now either post-docs or working in industry; without
them, I'd be lost.

Another thing to do is to hire an academic editor. Even though it might not
get everything right, there is nothing like peer-review quality feedback on a
paper that highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of your writing. One
thing to keep in mind is that a peer reviewer will be less likely to tell you
that your whole paper needs restructuring. They are often instead focused on
"within-the-box" improvements.

Seeing that a paper needs to be completely restructured can stem from being a
good non-fiction writer in general, rather than being a good "paper-writer."
It's a general skill relating to effective and efficient communication, and it
can be improved by writing blog posts, more feedback, and writer's workshops.
Similarly, to publish a paper without a PhD, you are probably going to have to
become, at the very least, a "lay-scholar" in the field you are thinking about
anyways. Maybe you are already well on your way.

Also, I went through a phase of thinking that I was special due to what I was
attempting to write and get published. I'm pretty sure that I was looked at
oddly by academics during this time. Maybe this is common for those of us
trying to publish a paper and who are right out of college. My point is that
this phase gave me the energy to submit to peer review, which was great. At
the same time, I'm very grateful to have outgrown it. I suspect this phase is
something many people go through; it's common.

------
CyberFonic
I hope you read the many great responses to your question. I learnt quite a
bit by reading them.

The key to having your work published is to know the field within which you
are publishing very well, cite the other papers concisely and accurately and
make a contribution to that body of work. This, in a nutshell, is the process
of working to gain a PhD.

As a general rule most journal papers evolve from conference papers. Most
conferences in CS/SE welcome "industry papers" aka non-academic contributions.
You could join the IEEE and/or ACM and subscribe to journals that match your
area of expertise.

Once you read widely you will identify who the key contributors in your field
are. You could contact them with a synopsis of your proposed contribution and
ask whether they might be interested or know of somebody who could be. In this
way you could connect with people who will collaborate with you to increase
the quality of your articles.

------
ISL
Share your paper with a colleague for comments. If they're a fan, they can
serve as an advocate with a journal if necessary.

Science is a social endeavor. If you don't have colleagues, go meet people!

As a referee, it doesn't matter at all to me whether you have a PhD. Your
institution may matter a little bit as context, but not a lot. It is the
science that matters.

As with any paper, I'll read the abstract, read the introduction, look at the
figures and the captions, glance at any short equation, and read the
conclusion. By the end of that process, I will know whether or not the paper
is worth further attention. The refereeing process is generally an investment
of several days of my time, so I do it with care.

Do the work, talk with people, get feedback, and repeat.

------
sam0x17
Here are some maybe sort of out there ideas I came up with:

1\. Be in the process of getting a masters degree. No one really cares at the
end of the day as long as you are a graduate student affiliated with a decent
school (this may be field-dependent). In CS you can easily publish for example
as a masters student at brown -- I have a friend who had no problem doing this
with no co-authors and never went on to get a PhD, but he was at an Ivy League
school.

2\. Find an academic friend or a former professor/adviser in your field and be
his/her co-author. This has the added benefit of potentially increasing the
quality of the research if they agree to edit/help you with it. Could be
combined with option 4.

2\. Be a former academic and publish to ArXiv using your old academic email
address (not really publishing, but at least people can cite it at that
point).

3\. Publish to ArXiv without an academic email address. People will be able to
cite it, but you won't be "published" per say (in the deep learning community
many, many citations are to preprint servers). People not familiar with
academia won't know the difference and will still be impressed if you say list
it on your resume under publications.

4\. Form an LLC, make a good website about how your company does research in X
field, and self-publish as a "white paper" (I took this approach a few years
ago, but I no longer maintain the website). In some industries, much of the
significant research is contained in white papers or company funded papers. It
might also be possible to submit to a conference/journal under the auspice of
a company -- I don't know how that works though.

5\. Get in touch with the journal/conference you want to submit to and explain
your situation and ask for advice. Depending on the venue they might be very
accommodating.

A note on "funding". At least in the CS community, funding is often not needed
to conduct groundbreaking research as it's 99% of the time just you sitting at
a computer. There are exceptions, but I think in CS being self-funded isn't
going to raise as many eyebrows as in other fields.

------
sgt101
I review a bit (less than I did), and I occasionally publish (each time with
the expectation that everyone will pick it up and start saying how important
and significant this paper is, but each time to watch it being cited twice if
I am lucky) so... fwiw

There must be a result or at least a clear contribution. Sans the result it's
really a poster or a think piece, but really you don't have a publication. A
publication is to demonstrate a new piece of confirmed knowledge; an
observation, measurement, analysis or proof.

The quality bit is "how good is the way that you are conveying this new
knowledge" is it sewn up, is every doubt closed, is the detail all there?

------
DrNuke
The best way for applied science is do not publish & find a way to exploit
your results commercially instead. That's why we sign NDAs while doing
consultancy gigs indeed. There is no actual gain in putting your effort out on
arXiv.org or conferences, only to be scooped by the numerous groups fighting
for grants and the many more outsiders looking for impossible recognition or a
fast buck from unscrupolous knowledge transfer. Just keep your results
private, exploit them on your own and send them all whistling.

------
arstin
Just curious: why try to publish in an academic journal if you're not an
academic?

In many fields, if you have the resources to do the research you wouldn't be
asking this question. And fields where single author, more creative (let's
call it) work is acceptable also seem to be areas with a broader audience
beyond readers of narrow, often paywalled journals and could be more
appropriate as a book, talk, blog, or arxiv post. And if you're not trying to
be an academic, you don't need publications for treading water in your career.

(I'm not being critical of the ambition. Even if the reason is just ego or
getting accepted into a group of people you respect, that's good enough reason
for me!)

------
preparedzebra
As a potential college dropout looking to publish my CS research, this is an
extremely helpful thread. Thanks everyone for your contributions!

~~~
MartianSquirrel
This is exactly why I started the thread: I dropped out of college a couple
years ago as I had opportunities that a degree could not offer me (I still
believe this was the good choice). But as I move forward and do more and more
RnD at work, in my startup and as a hobby, I would like to share some pieces
of information to the world.

All I would advise you is to embrace the unknown and strive to learn more
everyday.

Whichever path you chose, I wish you good luck.

------
aurelianito
Just write one (or many) blog entries somewhere. People in the academy publish
papers just because they are evaluated by the number of publications. Your
blog will have much more reach than any specialized journal. If you still want
to have a PDF mixed with the ones made by the academia, upload something to
arxiv.

------
graycat
I've published some papers in artificial intelligence as co-author. No one
asked for educational backgrounds. And I've published papers in applied math
as sole author: Again, no one asked about educational background. I do have a
relevant Ph.D., but no one asked.

I suggest, write a good paper, look for appropriate journals, and submit to
one of them. Maybe speed up the process a little: Send a copy of the paper (or
PDF file, as they wish) to the editor in chief with a cover letter not making
a formal submittal but just asking if, first glance, might this paper be of
interest for their journal?

I never paid anything, no _page fees_ , etc. to publish.

None of the papers, co-author or my sole author papers, got rejected.

Here are some hints that might help:

(1) Write the paper, especially in the abstract and the first paragraphs, like
you really know technically just what the heck you are doing. E.g., I started
one sole authored paper where I mentioned that a derivative I was taking was a
"dual vector" \-- not everyone who writes such applied math pays attention to
duality.

(2) In each of my sole authored papers, some of the key topics, prerequisites,
etc. were advanced and narrow enough that I'd guess that less than 10% of the
editors had all the prerequisites.

(3) I suggest that write applied math, mathematical statistics, and computer
science making important and appropriate use of some relatively advanced pure
math.

(4) Generally I suggest that just write applied math, with nearly all the
content in theorems and proofs, for mathematical statistics, computer science,
machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc. The usual criteria for
publication are "new, correct, and significant", and new and correct theorems
and proofs are big steps forward for these criteria. If the theorems are also,
in the paper, relevant to some applications or an applied field, then that can
help with "significant".

(5) Know quite well just how the heck to write math. A good way to learn this
is to have the equivalent of a good undergraduate major in pure math.

A good, first start on such writing is a theorem proving course in abstract
algebra, one that starts with sets and foundations and, then, all based on
just sets, develops groups, rings, fields, the rational, real, and complex
numbers, vector spaces, linear independence, linear transformations,
subspaces, null spaces, quotent spaces, duality, the adjoint transformation,
eigen values and eigen vectors, the Hamilton-Cayley theorem, inner products,
Hermitian and Unitary operators, maybe group representations. Then have a good
course in linear algebra, e.g., from the classic P. Halmos, _Finite
Dimensional Vector Spaces_ (one of the best writers of math). Then a good
course in analysis, e.g., from W. Rudin, _Principles of Mathematical Analysis_
, with highly precise writing. With a few more such good, pure math texts,
courses, etc. where the homework is essentially all theorems and proofs and
graded by a good mathematician who cares, one will no doubt learn how to write
math, and the learning will show.

In my case, I got a good start in a course in abstract algebra, with a good
prof who did well grading my papers, and then learned the rest just by
studying really good writers, learning how they wrote, without more good
grading.

How to write math is no big secret: There're a LOT of beautifully written math
texts on the shelves of the research libraries.

~~~
sgt101
There are quite a few very reputable journals (i.e. PLOS) which charge for
publication. Conferences also charge, but the justification is that you get to
go to the conference! The test for me is : is this for profit? The "proper"
conferences and the "free to access" journals are (should be) non-profit or
run by a not-for-profit foundation, money has to come from somewhere to keep
these afloat, but so long as there is no one cashing in then I think you are
good to pay.

------
seanmcdirmid
Many communities are double blind. Your lack of affiliation won’t hurt you in
that case, because the reviewers won’t know. You will, however, probably get
dinged for not knowing the standards, practices, and nuances of the community.

------
sytelus
Most top conferences are double blind, meaning that reviewers cannot see who
authors are and vice-versa. So _in theory_ it does not matter if you are
professional researcher or not. However in practice, its almost trivial to
identify a paper written by amature vs someone who has gone through the
graduate studies. So if you want to get published your priority should be to
avoid these mistakes. Here are some of things to remember:

* Read a lot of papers with a related work. Unless you have read and understood at least half a dozen of these, you are likely not ready to publish new work.

* Learn technical terminology and make sure how to use it precisely.

* Identify lose, unverifiable statements. Precision and clarity is super important.

* Know the history of the work. Make sure you note folks who came before you. Describe how your approach differs from others and/or builds on other. Failing to cite is one of the top reasons for rejection even for professional researchers.

* Get some theoretical grounding of your approach. Formalize your hunches and intuition in math equations that can be manipulated.

* Design experiments that shows your approach delivers better result than other under conditions you claim.

* Study the layout of other papers, their style and emulate them. Pay attention to how figures, data tables are describes, conclusions are made, claims are stated etc.

I often say that the primary job of researcher is to read papers and stay up
to date and secondary job is to make new discoveries. The way developers are
supposed to spend major chunk of their time to write code, researchers are
supposed to read papers. So familiarizing current state of the art and knowing
what has been done before, understanding pro and cons, internalizing
techniques, learning related math skills etc must be your absolute top
priority for the area you want to contribute.

If you have never published before, writing academic paper is a major chore.
It can easily take up 2-3 weeks of your time in ironing out details _after_
you have good results. However publishing paper is also satisfying. You add
the knowledge pool of humanity, your contribution can be built upon by others,
you get noted as "first people who did X" and so on. However don't expect to
build career as researcher - that _strictly_ requires PhD.

On a side note, there are bunch of non-academic or semi-academic conferences
which have less rigorous demands. So you can try to publish there as well.
I've seen lot of developers publish system design related papers at places
like KDD.

------
fatboy93
If you are pursuing that approach, why not publish it on Arxiv? Or put it up
in a blog and get doi for it using figshare.

------
inetknght
1) Own a domain. This is good to demonstrate your own views, values, work,
etc.

2) Put PDF on your domain.

3) Put your domain behind something like cloudflare.

4) Publish links to PDF. Ensure you have a method of feedback: email is
generally preferred and include your name and email in the PDF.

You could publish on third party services but consider them non-authoritive
and ephemeral. If you use them as primary distribution you _will_ get burned
in the future.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Posting PDFs on your own website is “publishing” in the literal sense of
putting information out there, but it is hardly publishing in the academic
sense of getting articles in print in a journal where other participants in
the field are going to see and respond to your work.

Since many journals have double-blind peer review, if the OP’s work is sound,
then there is no reason he should not go for journal submission. In terms of
building a reputation, that is a lot better than self-publishing, the domain
of cranks. In my own field of linguistics I know several people interested in
the subject who post their own PDFs on their own websites or on Academia.edu,
and though they try to format those PDFs to look serious and respectable,
these people creep most actual scholars out and we try to avoid those
writings.

Finally, peer review is not just gatekeeping, it leads to better papers. If
your work is publishable, then the peer reviews will often suggest ways you
can clarify your argumentation, and they will point you to interesting
citations that you might have missed. You miss out on all that by self-
hosting.

~~~
inetknght
If you think self-publishing is the domain of cranks then you'll never find
the people worth looking at.

Submitting to a journal is fine, but own your work on your own site.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> If you think self-publishing is the domain of cranks then you'll never find
> the people worth looking at.

Why you think that the people who self-publish are more worth looking at than
people who publish in journals?

~~~
inetknght
Why do you think people worth looking at are exclusively found in journals?

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Because the examples of self-hosted PDFs in my field that I have seen over
many years now, are so horribly crackpot that even if there is a magical 1% of
tenable self-published work out there somewhere, it is not worth people’s time
looking for it when journals offer a better signal-to-noise ratio.

And while it may not be true of cutting-edge STEM fields, most of the must-
cite literature in my own field is not available digitally and is in fact held
at only a few libraries worldwide. People are unlikely to have access to it
unless they are already closely involved in academia, and in that case they
will be keen on journal publication for career advancement. Consequently,
self-publication strongly correlates with not having an awareness of the
standard literature.

~~~
DoctorOetker
it's still sad those 1% are being glossed over.

I guess a lot of experts in their respective domain still spend a fraction of
their time reading other information sources with low signal to noise ratios:
news riddled with advertisement and propaganda, perhaps sports, fiction books
movies or television series. EDIT: addition: If they spent a quarter of that
time sorting crackpot papers the signal to noise level could be fixed, and
they'd still have 3/4 of the time for their usual news binge or whatver)

I'd actually be more than happy to see some tax payer money spent on the
following system: authors withoud accreditation can sign up on a government
hosted site, and provide their articles (or links or p2p hashes of them).
Accredited domain experts can participate and earn money by getting assigned 2
or 3 random papers in the same domain but from probable cranks. They simply
sort them in credibility. This way probably crank papers get scored, but the
top 1% eventually floats up. Scientists/experts inbetween jobs, or out of
office hours can earn money on the side, and BS gets seperated from intesting
ideas or insights. Signal to noise level near the top is good.

Edit:

I hereby hand out the idea for free, if you feel like making a startup:

Crack Crucible:

\- host (openly tongue in cheek) "crackpots" and their papers, self-
categorizing in domains

\- domain experts can sign up, the site generates a unique string, the expert
inserts the string on his/her researchgate profile, the site scrapes the
expert's researchgate profile. (hereby delegating 'expertness' to
researchgate), they too self-categorize in domains?

\- the site randomly selects 2 or more papers for the expert's applicable
domain, weighted by inverse word count of the paper (conciseness is rewarded
with opportunity to be seen)

\- the expert reads the 2 or more papers and is only asked to sort/rank them,
_without any implied support_ since most of the time all the papers wwere
nonsense, yet the site demands sorting them by (in)credibility

\- the result is interesting outsider papers by domain (without the coming and
going of news cycles, since the papers are selected at random, and hence
undergo brownian motion up and down)

~~~
coatmatter
This reminds me of Twitter mixed with a dose of slave-wage Mechanical Turk
labour. Although with Twitter, the signal to noise ratio is much lower than 1%
but I think you get my drift.

Granted there are "gems" to be found anywhere but it's still largely far too
much of a waste of time for most people.

See also: "the attention economy". What can _you_ offer that others want more
of - news, publishing, self-publishing, tweets? What's the cost and reward for
each party? Who is paying for the food and bills, and how?

------
qqn
Great post, I've just spent the greater part of the morning reading
everything. Shipdog had the best answer IMHO. My own approach follows
his/hers. It's pretty intense and laborious but worth the payoff. I'd
discovered some neat things to do with treating headaches during my master's
thesis but have been too busy in clinic since then to jump through hoops
publishing. I'm also very much against sitting in ivory towers with knowledge
that needs to be used right now so I decided to go the own-way route first:

1\. Self-publishing the document under a CCO license (vital!) as an easily-
navigable text on my own blog, snazzy PDF and datasets attached. Then I made
an ~1h-long video summarizing the entire report and plopped that on YouTube
(with proper timestaps that took forever but oh so worth it), linking it to my
blog and back.

2\. Next I shared all these on ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and, thanks to this
post, Figshare (for the DOI primarily). I had it up on Medium but that just
looked ugly for such a huge piece so I took that down (~50 pages without
citations). I also shared it on some other niche decentralized social networks
I frequent (eg: Diaspora). I would probably also share it on
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn if I was still there.

3\. The last steps I'll be doing shortly: emailing all my patients that I've
treated with relevant issues over the years with the blog post (~1000 people),
as well as all the main authors I'd cited (~25 folks) and all the therapists
I've worked with over the years (also ~25 folks), plus the few relevant
professional associations I'm a part of (at least 4, each of which has a reach
of a few thousand therapists via newsletters).

I'm doing all this because, applying what I've found, I'm able to resolve
muscle tension headaches in a matter of seconds instead of minutes, and I want
others to learn how to do this too -- and build on it. Once conversation
flourishes with all the above I might look into publishing with a journal
(higher sphere peer review is still very useful!) but, as a clinician, this is
a lot less important than its application. I'd already had some profs
interested in helping me turn this into a journal article but it was crucial
to me that this document I'd created remains 100% in my property, mostly so I
could then release it under the CC0 license without penalty. Having published
the official thesis on my terms like this now, I'm no longer worried about
this ever being a threat.

Some more context: my MSc was from a little-known EU program in sport psych,
and deals with the crossover between that field and massage, where I've been
working for a decade now. And so I say what all the (mostly CS/eng/mathy)
folks before have said: your mileage may vary. You can see where the rubber
meets the road on [https://spmx.ca/trp](https://spmx.ca/trp), and the WP
plugin that creates those great collapsible headings is
[https://wordpress.org/plugins/olevmedia-
shortcodes](https://wordpress.org/plugins/olevmedia-shortcodes). And why I
strongly advocate a CC0 license wherever possible: [https://spmx.ca/wp-
content/uploads/2018/03/00-headaches.png](https://spmx.ca/wp-
content/uploads/2018/03/00-headaches.png) ; )

Regarding writing better: write more. Remember the famous pottery parable
([https://kk.org/cooltools/art-fear](https://kk.org/cooltools/art-fear),
Ctrl+F "ceramics") and the old go saying: "lose your first 100 games quickly".
If rejection is a real fear, watch
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vZXgApsPCQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vZXgApsPCQ).
It really doesn't matter, especially if you're making this world a better
place. Good luck!

------
foo101
From the popular answers to this thread, I think the next relevant question
that arises is: How non-scholars can find opportunities to collaborate with
scholars? We need some kind of "Who is open to collaborating?" threads similar
to that of "Who is hiring?" threads.

------
nileshtechuz
There are many publications which accept research paper, it doesn't require
any degree.

