5 ms·
>Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality. I'm a complete outsider (not ev
by xamuel 7mo ago
>Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality.
I'm a complete outsider (not even in academia at all) and just got a paper accepted in the top math biology journal [1]. But granted, it took literally years to write it up and get it through. I do really worry that without academic affiliation it is going to get harder and harder for outsiders as gates are necessarily kept more and more securely because of all the slop.
[1] "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points" https://philpapers.org/archive/ALESCB.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/ALESCB.pdf
- mmooss 7mo agoCongratulations. How did you do it? And how do you get access to resources such as reference products, journals, etc. that typically require institutions with budgets?
- xamuel 6mo agoSorry for not seeing your message until now. Journals, at least in mathematics, generally don't require you to have a university affiliation, so as long as the paper is good on its merits, you can get it in, though I don't know to what extent it might be more of an uphill battle due to implicit peer reviewer bias etc. Re: reference products: one generally scraps what one can together through a combination of arxiv.org, Anna's archive, or emailing the authors.
- mmooss 6mo agoThanks for responding! Have you ever tried to get access to for-pay reference sources such as JSTOR? I haven't found a way other than going in-person to libraries, which is not practical.
- xamuel 6mo agoOn rare occasions where the other methods don't yield anything, I have friends in academia who have access and who are happy to help out. But yeah, it's totally medieval that this knowledge isn't freely available to the world.