Some of these things can be done by anyone yet academia gatekeeps the academic creds for itself. E.g. anyone can do machine learning research, but you can't publish in a journal without being affiliated to a university
Most people who publish in journals are affiliated with academia simply because that’s where the vast majority of basic research happens.
Edit: One of the most important papers in fracture mechanics was published in a campus newsletter. The publication venue doesn't matter that much.
the publication venue matters very much in most fields. it is rare exception when something is published elsewhere. the bulk of papers need to make it to goodish journals to be ever seen and considered when deciding about funding. Open access misses the target because it only replaces the publishing part, not the prestige part.
I’d be very interested in a link, that sounds cool!
One of the more important contributions in grain growth theory (crystalline materials, not food) is a short comment by John von Neumann, where I guess he attended a conference talk and just came up with this elegant topological theory right there.
Paris' Law, which predicts fatigue crack growth rate, was published in "The Trend in Engineering", which is the University of Washington College of Engineering alumni newsletter.
“Though Paris’s ideas presented a way to quantify and predict structural integrity, his approach was considered unconventional, and none of the leading journals published it. So, in January 1961, after leaving the UW to return to Lehigh for his Ph.D., Paris published his paper, ‘A Rational Analytic Theory of Fatigue,’ in The Trend.”
https://www.engr.washington.edu/news/article/2021-05-24/pari...
this is not true.