A group of engineers, physicists, biologists, chemists, and mathematicians were sitting together drinking beer and chatting, so the conversation wandered a bit. The topic got on somehow to the lottery, and then we all started relating our ultimate dreams: what would happen if one of us suddenly got a lot of money dropped into their lap?
Many of us decided we’d still be scientists or mathematicians, but do research that would never rely on a grant application again.
At least one of us decided we’d open up a commune or institute and invite in all the students and scientists who had interesting ideas, but who would never get a chance to get funding, much like the FQXi is doing these days (and what a good idea).
Still others said they’d leave science forever and just wander around the world.
I asked the table, why couldn’t we do both? Wander the world, do what we want, and still do science, if we had a lot of money? Several people almost immediately said that it was unusual for anyone to expect to ever publish any ideas in any journals without an affiliation or a set-up lab of some kind. The big-brother-aspect of affiliation was an important thing to consider. The impression was that where you publish from may be closely related to where you publish.
Which brings me to the buzz that’s surrounding e8 and Garrett Lisi’s work on a unified theory of everything. My last educational excursion into theoretical physics was over a decade ago, so I’m not qualified to comment on the details, problems, and successes of his unified theory across e8. But, he and I have some things in common: we have apparently gone to some of the same Burning Man festivals, we both share an interest in physics, and we’re generally non-traditional types of people. I don’t feel uncomfortable commenting on that.
I believe that a valuable contribution that Dr. Lisi is offering the world is the view that someone can live outside the mainstream and still love science and “do science”. Dr. Lisi can do his work on computers, and on paper, and seems to have various methods of support these days, but nobody would call them completely “mainstream”.
Lisi is a good example of how there might be ways of “doing science” that doesn’t require that one takes on a traditional trajectory in academia or industry. However, you’ll likely have to be dogged about it (Lisi’s been working at it for a decade), and pick a field that will be open to, and supported by, alternative ways of publishing ideas to your peers for pre-publication review.
An example of a mechanism for pre-publishing would be the site arXiv . When an author commits an article to arXiv, they are able to share papers and leave them open for searching. While it’s not peer-reviewed, it’s a good mechanism to expose your work to objective criticism while mountain biking at Wompy .
Hi Deanne,
Any thoughts about PLoS ONE?
Hi, David —
PLoS One is great and I hope to be publishing something I’m working on there. Unlike arXiv, though, it’s somewhat peer-reviewed (though as you know — probably not as stringently as some journals). Its advantage is that on publication, the community can discuss.
When I gave the example of arXiv, I was thinking along the lines of a site where one can post a public paper in a community of sorts, without peer review mechanisms in place. This means a lot of crazy things can get posted at arXiv, but half-finished things can get posted, too, and new revisions can be posted beyond the initial postings. You can post a work in progress, and revision it as it moves along.
There is, of course, also Nature Precedings, which “is a place for researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents”.
There are also fields that do follow the stringent peer-reviewed practice and yet fail to be perceived as valid by the main stream community, e.g. Sheldrake’s telepathy work.
Precedings is another good preprint resource — Here’s a list of a bunch of preprint servers, courtesy of U Chicago
I don’t know how many of them end up in Google Scholar but it appears that arXiv and Nature Precedings do get indexed in GS.
One thing I should have mentioned above: many journals will not accept final manuscripts based on material that has been published on preprint servers, so it’s always good to check out your favorite journals first and probably hedge on the side of caution if a few of them don’t allow publication of things that show up on preprint servers.
Hi Deanne,
May I return to your core theme:
“What would happen if one of us suddenly got a lot of money dropped into their lap?”
Well, not “a lot of money”, but early retirement at 54, and a wife who is happy to keep on working to let me pursue my ideas. (She also supported me thru my PhD…)
It’s …. great! No exams to mark, no meetings, no pressure to get grants or write papers. Get up, chop some logs, fire off some emails to people who are busier than me, do some exploratory programming: bliss!
My field is environmental modelling – tools, doing it on the web, etc – so all I need is a computer. I guess most academics need more infrastucture for doing their thing.
Main problem is introducing myself when I do give a talk, since there’s no label for people like me. ‘Dilettante academic’ probably comes closest, but then it further diminishes any residual respect the audience might have for someone without a proper affiliation. ‘Independent academic’ is probably more acceptable, but potentially misleading in my case since I have an association with a software company related to my academic interests.
What would be nice would be to have a club for active academics who operate outside the system. Anyone interested in helping to set one up?
Deanne,
Best of luck with your PLoS ONE Paper. I think the level of peer review at PLoS is pretty stringent actually.
What’s great is that Journals like PLoS do the peer reviewing in an open manner which is most refreshing.
I think we will see a lot more commenting post publication taking place.
Check out ‘Publishing in the New Millennium’.