[underbooter]

They always have been able to. It's called a blog, personal or company.

But everyone knows why "serious research" isn't mostly published on blogs:

Corporations like Elsevier have successfully executed takeovers of research centers (universities) and made journal submission a mandatory rite of passage for academics joining the state-mandated academia funnel. Don't publish? No postdoc for you. No professorship for you. No grant approval or news coverage.

Do publish in an academic journal? All the work you did, all the IP you invented, is assigned to the university and/or the grant funder. You're basically a non-shareholder: a contractor.

Researchers who do publish on their own tend to be viewed as cranks, since they generally don't use "journalese" and aren't required to cite from the same pool of "officially published" articles. Consequently, they also can't really get cited outside of the blogosphere - a blog post isn't "legitimate literature."

Researchers who don't publish in official journals and are labeled cranks generally can't afford to do research long term.

So how do you divorce yourself from academia?

Start a research company or project

Get funding via grants, product sales, donations

Use your research to directly build products and get a return on R&D invested

Decide to not publish your research in the open because doing so would take away the information asymmetry keeping you ahead of the competition

Oops, you are no longer publishing.

[danaris]

> Corporations like Elsevier have successfully executed takeovers of research centers (universities) and made journal submission a mandatory rite of passage for academics joining the state-mandated academia funnel.

I...think the causality on this is wrong.

"Publish or perish" long predates Elsevier's rapacious consumption of journals. The reason they did that in the first place is because they already knew it was, in effect, a captive audience.

[underbooter]

At the present moment it doesn't much matter how it started.

Before Elsevier, journal articles or "letters" were just correspondence between individual researchers. The big publishers got into it later.

[mapt]

I lost a lot of respect for science when my advisor explained that it didn't matter that the cutting edge work I wanted to extend was being done by Some Guy On A Forum, I wasn't allowed to to cite them, and a pity too, because it was probably correct.

[elashri]

To be honest and judging by the amount and quality of emails I receive weekly from people claiming to have a discovery or sharing this last unification theory, this is a safe assumption. The problem that peer-review solve it not to waste your valuable little time seeing if this is following reasonable scientific methods or not. It does not tell you that this wrong or correct.

I ready about 30 papers weekly (below average) and I spend 2 days out of my week reading them. This without having to read anything, it would be a much worse situation where I have to read too many just to find that many of them are just written by cranks.

Someone can say we can can pay for people to have some sort of verified aggregate feed of articles. Yes that is possible and congratulations, you just reinvented peer-review system.

[BeetleB]

> I lost a lot of respect for science when my advisor explained that it didn't matter that the cutting edge work I wanted to extend was being done by Some Guy On A Forum, I wasn't allowed to to cite them

My strong guess is that your advisor was wrong (or you misunderstood him). I've often seen citations to random web sites. Even citations to conversations. The purpose of citation is to give credit, not rack up points.

Perhaps he was saying it was too risky to base your work off of some blog post, as his work was not yet "established" because it hadn't been published.

[kergonath]

I think it depends on how the reference is used. Something like “here is a proof or an explanation, it’s great and I am going to repeat it here but it came from that website over there so don’t think I came up with it” is very different from “there is a proof over there so I will accept it as true and you should too” (i.e., how citations tend to be used most of the time, unfortunately).

Even as a referee I would be happy with the former, provided that there is a permanent link or a pdf of the webpage in the supplementary material. I really would not let the latter fly.

[BeetleB]

> is very different from “there is a proof over there so I will accept it as true and you should too” (i.e., how citations tend to be used most of the time, unfortunately).

I have seen exactly this. A (famous) professor at my university had a manuscript for a textbook that he had been working on for years, but had not yet published. A number of people wrote papers citing the (unpublished) book.

Of course, this is a bit of an outlier as the author had over the years given people drafts of his book.

Still, I would say that as long as the referee can access the web site and verify it, it should be allowed (and I'll still assert that it has been allowed on numerous occasions). May vary with discipline, though.