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Excuse my ignorance; You used quotation marks around independent researcher. Is that because these are “regular” people who are doing research outside their exp
by bardworx 8y ago
Excuse my ignorance; You used quotation marks around independent researcher. Is that because these are “regular” people who are doing research outside their expertise?
I’ve always thought that an independent researcher was someone who studied within their field just had no monetary backing. Ex: a person with a PhD in X that does research on a subset of X, in their free time.
- dekhn 8y agoyour understanding is roughly correct. I met an independent researcher (Bob Edgar) who had sold his company to Intel and was bored. He started to attend seminars at Berkeley to find people who wanted his help, met a few folks, and ended up being one of the top people in the field of protein sequence alignment. At first, my advisor helped him by giving him an arbitrary appointment at Berkeley because otherwise journals wouldnt accept his papers because he was "independent". Eventually he reached the point where he could publish with his email address as affiliation (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15034147 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15034147). Of course, these days, he'd just publish to biorxiv and put the code in github.
- bardworx 8y agoThank you for the explanation. Reading his CV (http://www.drive5.com/papers/resume.html http://www.drive5.com/papers/resume.html), it seems that even though he is a peer reviewed "Computational Biologist", his PhD is in Theoretical High-Energy Physics, who became a systems developer.