>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.
Congratulations. 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?
Sorry 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.
Thanks 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.
On 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.
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