If you want to spend some money and go hard on defending the thing as "yours" before having definitive evidence from other scholars that it's really novel, regi

If you want to spend some money and go hard on defending the thing as "yours" before having definitive evidence from other scholars that it's really novel, register a patent. It's similar standard to that of the standard of an academic white-paper published in a journal. I don't recommend, as patents are today useless for innovation and serious work, although that's the exact reasons they were created in the first place