Someone commented the other day that they thought that academic journals did not allow nonacademics to publish in them. Actually this is not the case, and it seems to be the rare journal that actually has a policy that says no nonacademics allowed. Most allow nonacademics, but in some fields such as Biology, Economics or Physics, you are simply not going to be able to write anything adequate enough to make it into an academic journal unless you have been through a recent PhD program in that specialty. They said that no nonacademic would ever be able to write a paper good enough to make it into a Physics, Biology and Economics journal.
Other fields are more lenient.
Some say that the paper would probably be rejected without even being read due to the fact that the author was not an academic. However, if you as a nonacademic can get someone at a journal to look at your work, there should be a problem with peer reviewers marking you down due to being a nonacademic. This is because peer review is supposed to be done via a double-blind process. That is, the peer reviewers are not supposed to have any idea whatsoever who you are or what your qualifications are as that may bias them. They are simply given your paper and asked to look it over and the reviewer has no idea who wrote it whether the author is an academic or not.
Often what you find is people who have obtained an advanced degree, sometimes a Master’s Degree but usually a PhD, who have either left academia for industry or were never academics in the first place. Not that is anything wrong with a Master’s Degree. In fact, one of the most important engineering papers of the 20th Century was written by Claude Shannon while he only had a Master’s.
These people are often referred to as independent scholars and there is even an association for them. One well-known one is a Carmelite nun who has resided in her order for decades now, Claire Ortiz Hill. She regularly publishes in Philosophy journals in the area of Phenomenology and is highly regarded. However, she does have a PhD.
In some fields, independent scholars are more the norm than academics. In fields that are deeply embedded with industry such as Industrial Design, Industrial Manufacture, etc. there is actually a lot more work going on in industry labs than there is in academia. There are many people with doctorates in these fields working in industry labs doing various experiments. They publish very regularly.
Computer Science journals now feature many independent scholars because so many Computer Science PhD’s nowadays head off to work in the industry for big money, probably more than they would make in academia. Independent scholars who publish in computer science journals typical have Computer Science PhD’s though.
There have been some pretty famous independent scholars. Einstein was only granted his PhD in 1966 long after his best work had been done. He did his finest work when he only had a Master’s Degree. Ted Parker, the finest field ornithologist who ever lived, barely got a Bachelor’s Degree and then quit school. He never did obtain his PhD, but he was granted a position as a research associate at Louisiana State University. He published dozens of peer-reviewed papers. He was finally granted an honorary doctorate after his untimely death in a plane crash.
Eugene Eisenmann, Panama’s most famous ornithologist, published many important papers in academic journals though he never had a degree in biological science. In fact, his only degree was a JD, and he spent his life working as an attorney.
In the 1800′s before there were many professional academics or endowed chairs, we witnessed the phenomenon of the gentleman scholar. These were often men who were independently wealthy enough to fund their own research. Many of the best scientists of the 19th Century including Darwin fell into this category.
