I think i’ve discovered something important in the field I dabble in as a advanced hobbyist. Like this was a breakthrough and perspective shift enough for me to stay awake all night into the morning until I had to go to sleep testing it works and boilerplating the abstract paper. I constructed a theoretical framework, practical implementation, and statistically analyzed experimental results across numerous test cases. I then put my findings into as good a technical paper as I could write up. I did as much research as I could to make sure nobody else had written about this before.
At this point though I don’t really know how to proceed. Im an outsider systems engineer not an academic, and arXiv requires you be endorsed/recognized as a member of the scientific community with like a college email or written recommendation by someone already known. Then whenever I look at the papers on arxiv they always look a very specific way I cant get with libreoffice writer. Theres apparently a whole bunch of rules on formatting and font and style and this and that. Its overwhelming and kind of scary.
So. What do i do here? I have something I think is important enough to get off my ass and get in touch with a local college to maybe get a recommendation. I’d like to have my name in the community and contribute.
Thank you for your insight! Isn’t there a risk if I send someone my work they might snipe it and publish it as their own?
If someone steals your work and doesn’t credit you then they are risking ending their career when you turn up with the receipts.
If you’re worried about that happening, then just have your manuscript notarized so that you can later prove that it existed at a certain point in time.
Frankly, yes there is. However, the same can essentially be said about posting a preprint somewhere online. Some asshole could still rip it off and submit it to a journal. Most likely the reviewers won’t have come across your preprint, and if you accuse them of stealing your idea, they’ll just claim independently discovering the same thing.
The only way you can really stay air-tight is writing up a proper article and submitting it to a journal. That can be a tough process to get through though, so you may be better off finding someone in the academic world that you are willing to trust.
In most fields, there are some people that float between industry and academia, so you may find someone that a common acquaintance can vouch for.
A possible protection for OP and anyone else reading this could be to upload a draft of a report to a repository at osf.io (Open Science Foundation). You can keep the repository hidden for now, but it’ll be there with a date stamp on it should the worst happen and somebody rip off the work
Happy cake day!