[paulpauper]

I have found arxiv to be a dead-end when publishing without affiliation. It's impossible to get feedback on papers, let alone the necessary endorsement to submit. That leaves SSRN as the only option. Arxiv requires you to email authors for endorsements which almost never works, since it's essentially spam.

[claudius]

The arXiv is not necessarily a tool where everybody can publish everything. It is primarily a tool for the community, which consists mostly of people with affiliations. If you want feedback for something as an outsider, go to conferences and present a poster.

[tagrun]

A few more nice points about arxiv: 1) peer-review can take sometime, it's nice to be able to get your work out earlier publicly for the records, which you can make a claim later on 2) even after publication, it is accessible by anyone (and it is common to update the arxiv version to match the published version, including improvements after peer review)

It's probably not very useful for getting comments. The only comments I ever get are along the lines "I see your nice manuscript, please don't forget to cite these papers of mine". To my surprise, it is mostly "leading" physicists who send such mails (which makes me doubt their citation records).

[jessriedel]

Why not submit to a journal?

[XaspR8d]

The "without affiliation" aspect is a dealbreaker in many fields. Lots of journals won't even acknowledge you if you're not at an academic institution.

[argonaut]

It's not a dealbreaker in computer science, where the norm is for blind peer review. And in any case, you can just list your undergrad institution or a company.

[jessriedel]

Actually, I think you'll find there are sufficient number of mid or lower tier journals that will send these out to referees. I've refereed papers from non affiliated researchers before. And even Nature will send you an rejection letter.

[dnautics]

1) opposition to journal copyrighting policies

2) cost

[jessriedel]

Most journals in the fields dominating the arXiv (physics, math, CS, and probably more) allow you to submit to the arXiv concurrently. So unless you refuse out of principle, you can both get free refereeing and release the paper open access.

[dnautics]

I'm aware that most subdisciplines of physics and CS are sympathetic to arXiv, but that is most certainly not the case in bio and chemistry, although the rise of biorxiv may start changing things.

[jessriedel]

OK, but paulpauper was considering submitting the to arXiv.

[tobias2014]

There is vixra (vixra.org), but they also (mostly) have the "funny" stuff.