Ask HN: Best way to publish papers as a non-scholar?
(edit: my publication experiences are heavily biased towards biotech/biomedical/natural sciences fields.  Your CS Experience May Vary, particularly w/r/t the prestige of conference papers.)<p>The obvious answer that you might not like very much is "write a paper and co-author it with an established group."  If you share a lede with an established group, that's immediate credibility.<p>Journals happily accept manuscripts from first/corresponding authors who don't have PhDs.  Graduate students publish regularly; depending on your program this is effectively obligatory.<p>Self-funding publication in a peer-reviewed journal will raise eyebrows -- so see my first suggestion, which offloads the often substantial publication costs onto a grant.  (Our group's last publication cost was ~$4500, for a benchmark.  That's higher than normal but it was open access with 6 color figures). Crediting a grant for the work also lends credibility; someone gave you cash to do this thing, so obviously they don't think you're totally nuts.<p>Publishing preprint-only on the arxiv is well established.  I think you need someone to vouch for you the first time, but that shouldn't be too hard depending on the field.<p>Depending on the field, single-author maunscripts are either basically normal (parts of CS, much of mathematics, some theoretical physics), a giant red flag (experimental physics, biology-adjacent fields), or somewhere in between (economics?).<p>Do not ever use a vanity publisher for scientific articles.  If the journal ever appeared in Beall's list, run, because it's a mark of shame.<p>Finally, don't necessarily attribute your marginalization to not having a PhD -- the politics of publication are ruthless no matter who you are.