Ask HN: How do you publish your work when you're not in academia?

I would like to share my experience on publishing my work in a top-tier IEEE journal, without any connections with academia. I have been working in industry and is considering shifting to academic research career. But the lack of publications made my chances very low. So I took up a research project, did research on it during "after the job hours". Once I was satisfied with the results, I created an account on IEEE paperplaza, wrote the paper as per the standards set by the journal and submitted. After five months of review, the paper got accepted. You can read more of my story here https://achuwilson.github.io/blog/2016/09/how_i_wrote_resear...

If you're talking about journals, my understanding is that most journals don't have any hard requirement that you be associated with an academic institution to be published. You see, for example, researchers from corporate research groups get published on occasion. Now, the bar to get in might be a bit higher, since that academic affiliation is probably perceived (rightly or wrongly) as having some signaling value. But if you have some sufficiently interesting results and a well-written paper, I would think you could get it published.

This is probably even more true if you're not too picky about what journal you get published in. Getting in Nature is tough for anybody, but there are plenty of less prestigious journals that probably have less restrictive editorial policies.

And if you don't necessarily care about being published in the strictest technical sense, but just want to get your material "out there" then you can probably submit to arXiv (or BioRXiv or ChemRXiv or whatever pre-print server is relevant to your field), and/or write it up on a blog and submit the link to relevant sub-reddits, HN, etc., etc.

One approach is to publish in one of the archives. For example, http://www.arXiv.org or http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr. These are not truly archival publications, but they are where the action is these days. Another approach--join a technical society (e.g., the Association for Computing Machinery or the IEEE) and submit papers for publication to their archival journals. You can publish small short papers at various blogging sites. For example, http://www.medium.com, which has become very popular as of late as a browse of HN will verify.

No result is real until it has been published.

On a blog. See iquantny.tumblr.com as a great example. http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/144197004989/the-nypd-was-sy...

I was wondering about the same. I think you just apply to a conference with your research paper following it's standards. Again, it may depend on the conference and the field.

But then again, if it's something genuinely new and well done(i.e. not a new way how to tweet if your plant is thirsty) I doubt anybody would refuse to publish the paper.

Idea #1: Just submit the paper normally and hope for the best.

Idea #2: Write your work as a book or pamphlet and publish it as an e-book, for example on LeanPub.

Idea #3: Do a favor for a pal in academia and let him co-author the paper with you. It helps him with his tenure/promotion progress, and with his experience he may be able to help you prepare the work to go through peer review.

Good conferences may do peer review for free and act as gatekeepers for sneaking in as an independent influencer.