An Alt-Ac's publishing dilemma


A couple of blog posts ago I was pondering my dilemmas about peer reviewing as an alt-ac. This week I've been pondering actual publishing as an alt-ac.  Here's how my pondering started (after a long couple of weeks at the beginning of the semester)...

Given that...

  • As an alt-ac I do not need to have published articles to be promoted in my professional work;
  • As an alc-ac I do not get professional recognition for works published (except for some internal delight when I see my citation numbers😅)
  • As an alt-ac I don't get "work release" time from my dayjob to work on this research, so any research work I do eats into my hobby/free time;
  • As a hobby, research publications don't pay (whereas other gigs do, providing an incentive to give up some of your free time in exchange for my expertise);
  • Publication of research is hitting bottlenecks, both with peer reviews and periodic journal moratoria;
  • Even without the bottlenecks, getting through peer review can be a challenge (thanks to Reviewer 2😂) and even with good publications it's been a challenge at times to get published;
  • I have at least two publications (ca. 2018 and 2021 respectively) that I completed but have yet to publish because of journal moratoria or book editors ghosting me after the work was completed - and don't feel like doing the reformatting work (or updating work) to resubmit elsewhere...
The question is: Does it make sense that I continue down this path of research and publication? 

Don't get me wrong.  I do like reading and writing, and I could very likely get a couple of 8000-word manuscripts out each year, I don't think I see the value of submitting these to peer-reviewed publications. I see a bit more value in pursuing book chapters (after all, that process is a bit more staged, and at least there's a book contract in hand!) but getting completed research into peer-reviewed research in journals feels very administratively taxing for something that is essentially a hobby. It's that last mile that feels insurmountable at this point; or at the very least yes it's possible to get over that hump, but the reward for such an effort doesn't seem worth the inputs it needs in terms of time and effort.

Any fellow alt-acs out there?  What do you think of the peer-reviewed pub lifecycle? Do you find it fundamentally worth it? If not, at what point did it lose the luster for you? 🤔

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