What's the Process for Publishing Scientific Papers?

[twofish-quant]

Also journals are *terrible* for handling new and original ideas. If you have a new and original idea, then you want to share it with your friends over beer at a conference.

 

[Dale]

you underestimate how difficult that can be for someone with no academic affiliation. Publishing in high impact factor journals seems to be very difficult and possibly expensive for outsiders.

I have no academic affiliation and publish a half-dozen papers per year or so. The only difficulty is that people w/o academic affiliations rarely have anything of high enough quality to pass peer review. Those that do have high quality research and writing have no more difficulty getting published than their academic counterparts.

If an academic wrote a great paper and a non academic wrote a piece of junk and then they swapped papers and each submitted the other's paper then generally the academic's affiliation would not make the junk pass peer review and the non academic's lack of affiliation would not prevent the great paper from passing peer review.