Indie Research was founded to address the following problem:

Researchers in academia have little freedom to pursue curiosity-driven research, particularly, research that is risky and outside of the mainstream.

This has undesirable consequences for:

  • society, since it contributes to the stagnation of scientific progress, and
  • researchers, who feel unfulfilled and short-changed by their careers.

We aim to mitigate the above-mentioned consequences by developing the following solution:

A framework for researchers to acquire resources needed (skills, time, money, community) to pursue curiosity-driven research on their own terms.

In this blog, we will explore what drives researchers to academia in the first place, and what they find when they get there.

We will then dissect the typical academic position to figure out which parts are desirable, which parts are tolerable, and which parts should be eliminated.

While doing so, we will disentangle the two positions:

  • research as a job (aka externally-driven research),
  • research as a calling (aka curiosity-driven research).

From this, we will build a selection of models for alternate career paths:

  • The financially independent researcher model
  • The sabbatical model
  • The side-hustle model
  • The freelance/soloproneur model
  • The barista model
  • The crowdsource model
  • The eternal postdoc model

The common theme across the first five models is that you don’t get paid to do curiosity-driven research. Instead, you earn money doing something else1 to support a lifestyle that gives you the freedom to do curiosity-driven research on your own terms.

With the last two models, you do get paid to do curiosity-driven research, but in a way that’s fundamentally different to the standard academic path.

We will elaborate on all of these models (and likely others) in subsequent posts.

When you become an indie researcher, it’s important to have a solid grasp of your personal finances, and a basic understanding of how to invest your money. We will discuss some of these issues here (we will not be giving investment advice, but will point to useful literature).

Besides money, there are three other resources needed to achieve an indie researcher lifestyle. These are:

  • certain kinds of life skills/soft skills
  • time (which can be either acquired through money and/or time-management)
  • community (with academia and outside of it).

We will therefore also discuss how to acquire these in upcoming posts.

Since indie researchers by design have a lot more freedom in how they conduct and disseminate their research, we will also touch on the topic of open science.

The broader theme here is redefining research, so we will also touch on other complementary approaches being pursued elsewhere, such as philanthropic field building.

We also think it’s important for future indie researchers to see how others are doing it, in various forms and according to different models (or combinations of them). We will therefore feature profiles of existing indie researchers.

Well, that’s mostly what you can expect from this blog. Although, we’re sure that other topics relevant to the goal of becoming a curiosity-driven indie researcher will come up and we will also discuss them here.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, please:

  • add this site to your bookmarks
  • follow us on twitter
  • subscribe to the RSS Feed for the blog.

Also, take a look at our resources page, which contains a growing list of relevant links.

Finally, we love getting to know people around the world, so send us an email. Tell us where you are and what you’re working on. We reply to all!

Notes

  1. This could be externally-driven research, but doesn’t have to be.

Image generated by: craiyon.com