A repository for independent research

Some of the most useful work happening today is being done by people who do not have institutional affiliations. They publish to substacks, GitHub repos, and PDFs uploaded to forgotten URLs. They cite each other in footnotes. They cannot get DOIs. They cannot easily be found. Their work decays.

We think that's a waste. nonacademicresearch.org is an open repository where independent researchers can publish papers, version them, get them cited, and discuss them in public — without applying for permission.

Three commitments

Open from day one. Code, decisions, and failures are public. The platform is licensed under AGPL-3.0. You can run your own instance.

Free for individuals, forever. Researchers do not pay to publish or access content. We will pursue grants and optional services for organizations rather than charging individuals.

Citeable. Every paper gets a stable identifier on day one. We mint temporary nar:* identifiers in the MVP and migrate to real DOIs via DataCite once the platform completes nonprofit registration. Existing identifiers will continue to resolve.

What we are not

We are not a peer-review platform. We are not a publisher. We are not a credentialing body. We are a repository — a stable, citable, discussable home for independent work. Discussion happens in public threads on each paper, not behind closed doors.

Wrong ideas are welcome. Plagiarism, fabricated authorship, doxxing, and content that is illegal in jurisdictions we operate in are not. Moderation actions are logged publicly.