I recently published a paper with Springer Nature in their Scientometrics journal as an unaffiliated author. Performing research, writing a paper, undergoing peer-review can easily take a few months to years. It is a time and energy-consuming activity. While I was not shy of working on this paper, being an unaffiliated researcher did bring the anxiety because of the dilemma whether it will be acccepted by any good scientific journal for publication. And there is a good reason behind that. How many times do we see a research article submitted by an unaffiliated authors? From my experience, none. Although I have seen papers from single authors, they had their university or industry affiliations. So, I searched more about it on the web. This search, though gave me hope of publishing as an independent author, the concern regarding being unaffiliated researcher stayed. This post is about my experience how to publish as an independent author.

Why publish

Some of you may ask why even pursue publishing in an academic journal. The answer for me was simple! The desire to present my research on a peer-reviewed platform, acceptable to the scientific community, was important for me.

Don’t forget the power of preprint servers

Publish your research paper first in a preprint server. It will serve two puposes.

• Publicity: If your paper has strength it will start getting traction. I was benefitted with it. In a couple of days my preprint was tweeted by a few and was mentioned in couple of blogs. This can raise your Altmetric score, which is the amount of attention that a research output has received.
• Citations: Even before your paper is published in a peer-reviewed paper, you can start getting citations. This also worked in my case. By the time my paper was published by a journal, the preprint version was already cited a couple of times.

Both these points are advantageous and can make your paper attractive to journals. You can mention these points in your cover letter to the editor of a journal during submission.

Make your research solid and transparent

This point applies to all scientific research, but I want to stress its importance when it comes to publishing research as an unaffiliated researcher. Provide as many experiments and results as possible. This way you will be giving more value to your paper and will make your research attractive. Importantly, try to make your research transparent. That is, if possible, make your data available online. My research involved data analytics and machine learning. So, I made the underlying data available on my github repository. This builds trust.

Concern - publishing cost!

A thing of concern specially for any unaffiliated researcher is the publishing fee that many journals ask for. But, this mostly applies to open access journals. One can try journals following paywall model or hybrid model. I opted for a journal with hybrid model. This can be a compromise to publish a scientific research, when you don’t have funds to finance your research.

Moreover, I want to direct the reader to check for journals/publishers such as Springer Nature where authors with financial constraints can ask for a waiver of article processing fees. The publisher then decides the fee waiver on case by case basis.

One good news is that there are some publishers like Springer Nature which allows authors to publish their post-peer reviewed but pre-copyedited version of the article on their own websites. In addition, Springer Nature provides a url to authors to share on their social media. Although, this link is read-only and the article cannot be downloaded, but, atleast the article is available for reading. It is great to see that big publishers like SpringerNature are taking these steps to make research output available to everyone.

Here is the link to the paper I recently published: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-021-03907-0