u/sunmat02

I've seen a bunch of "I'm an independent researcher, how do I publish my paper" posts lately and I thought our answers (mine included), as researchers, wasn't satisfactory, mostly questioning whether the OP had actually done any valuable research to begin with. It's not the best response because these independent researchers are genuinely excited about something, and we risk making it look like research is a closed community of pretentious people (which it isn't) and push them in the opposite direction (anything from low-quality predatory journals to pseudo-science).

So in this post, I will assume that you are an independent researcher, and that you have a contribution genuinely worth publishing.

You might have used AI to conduct this research. In fact, I hope that you did: many researchers nowadays use AI to boost their productivity (without creating slop... in most cases), so you would likely have no chance to compete against them without the help of a (properly used) AI assistant. If not, simply asking any AI "here is my work, is that new?" would be a good start. The AI will likely point you towards titles of papers that are most like your work. I will assume that you read all of them, and understood them. I'll also assume you followed up on the papers that these papers cite, triaged them to figure out which ones are relevant, and read them. And so on. I will assume that your paper has a proper "Related Works" section where you don't just cite these papers, but explain why your work is different.

Next, what you likely don't see is that from a researcher's idea to its publication in a journal, there are a few other types of publications in between. In my field at least, I'll likely have a PhD student or a postdoc in my team present the work (or even just the idea, with very preliminary results) as a poster in a conference; then/or I will submit a work in progress paper to a workshop; then a longer, more complete version to a conference; eventually an even more cleaned up version in a journal. I very rarely think "my work is worth a shot in a journal" from the beginning, and if I waited until it is, most likely another team would have published the same idea in the mean time.

This leads me to what you should do: identify a conference in the field of your research. It will most likely have a poster session, and a few workshops orbiting it. Decide whether to (1) submit a poster (usually that's a 2-page abstract of your research), or (2) submit a paper at the workshop you consider most relevant (paper length may vary from 4 to 10 pages, usually). In both cases, your work will be peer-reviewed. Most posters are accepted if the abstract is clear enough and in scope; there is an understanding that posters are for you to stand in front and say "this is what I'm working on, let's have a chat about it". Acceptance rates for workshops is generally high too (depending on the workshop, I know some with 90% acceptance, and some with under 20% acceptance).

If your work is accepted, register for the conference and fly there (yes, it costs money, that's why researchers write research proposals, so their institution can pay for this. But you are an independent researcher so you will have to finance it yourself. Being an independent researcher will cost you, not bring you money. If you want money, target a pattent, not a research paper). While there, talk to people, make connections, accept criticisms of your work. And watch the talks at the conference, they will show you what to expect for the next step.

If you read this an thought "oh cool, that sounds exciting!" it's a great start. Research is a whole process, not a paper. If however you thought "but I want a paper in a journal!" and the whole thing above sounds tedious, you probably haven't understood what research is.

Edit to add that I’m in a sub field of CS research. Some of the advice above may not nap exactly onto other fields.

I had a company come for a quote to install AC in my home (4 rooms). To make a long story short, the guy was trying to put all the units on walls with a straight shot to outside. This is restricting our placement options (making one of them actually inconvenient) and forces a 4 indoor + 2 outdoor unit system.

For 3 of the rooms, we could make the pipes go through the loft (which at the moment is not boarded). This would allow all the indoor units to be at convenient locations, and to be connected to a single outdoor unit on a side of the house in also a convenient location (same aide as the 4th room, and a lot more discrete). But the guy said he would need to put a pump in the loft and that this is the first thing that usually breaks.

So my question is: is he right or is he trying to minimize his own inconvenience?

Note: another company proposed a 4 + 1 system based on room sizes but hasn't yet come to assess placement options.

Raspberry Pi OS, just installed yesterday (July 23) to give you an idea of the version.

I'm going in the preferences, keyboard, and using the sliders to set repeat and delay, it works fine. Then I reboot, and the behavior goes back to the defaults. The sliders still point to my preferred values. Not event ChatGPT could help me. Any idea?

I've done xset r rate 250 60 (but it's not permanent), I have a ~/.config/autostart/keyboard-repeat.desktop file that includes calling xset, but it doesn't change anything.

Also, impossible to find a menu where I can remap some keyboard shortcuts (I'm very used to the Mac layout and use the same keyboard on both the Pi and my Mac, so I'd like things like copy/past to be Cmd+C/V instead of Ctrl-C/V or worse Ctrl-Shit-C/V on the terminal). Any suggestions would be appreciated.

My QV 35S started a vacuum+mopping program on its own. We have never defined a schedule, and I double checked, it had none listed in the app. My wife and I both have the Roborock app on our iPhones but neither of us started it. Is there any way to know why it suddenly started?

I was wondering if anyone had done some data/code mining of the game to try to figure out the random process that drives which items spawn, which rooms are in your pool on a given day, which ones are proposed to you (e.g. what "commonplace", "standard", "rare", etc. mean), their orientation, and so on? Given that Tonda Ros spent literally years fine tuning the game, I assume this process must have been extremely well thought so that people feel that they make progress from a day to they next, without making it trivial.

I did a level 3 survey before buying my house. Upon moving, I realized that some radiators aren’t on the correct zone: two upstairs radiators are on the downstairs zone and one downstairs radiator is on the upstairs zone. Annoying.

Now, a friend today said the surveyor should have caught this and I could have a claim against them, given that fixing the problem is expensive (removing floor, tracing pipes, etc.) and I could have reduced my offer accordingly.

The document I got from the surveyor honestly felt like it had more pages covering them legally than actually saying something about the house. Besides, it’s now been a year since the survey (not that heaters change zones by themselves).

But I’m so curious, if I had complained to the surveyor upon moving in, would I have had a claim? Is this kind of problem in the scope of a level 3 survey?