As many have said, you don't need a PhD to publish - it is quite routine for people to publish papers while they are working towards their PhD. In some countrie

As many have said, you don't need a PhD to publish - it is quite routine for people to publish papers while they are working towards their PhD. In some countries your thesis actually consists of submitting these papers that you have published to a research committee in order to get a PhD. If you believe you can make a genuine contribution to a field, you need to pick a candidate publication, read it to understand its style convention, follow the "Instructions to Authors" religiously and pay the page charges (where appropriate). In your paper you need to link what you present to research that has been published before - think of science as case law - it builds up iteratively. By basing your work on previously peer-reviewed publications you are helping your reviewers see that you are working on solid ground. Most editors will screen arrant nonsense ("I can prove Einstein was wrong"), but are likely to pass reasonable material to a review panel irrespective of any qualifications of the authors. The real question is why you would want to. Generally being published in a peer-reviewed journal is only of real value to academics, because they are rated depending on their publication and citation rates. Otherwise, if you can anything interesting to say you can just publish it on a paper server (eg. arXiv as mentioned in another comment).