In this issue:

• Who are the Research Gatekeepers?
• May Workshop – Thinking cafe
• From Social

Who are the Research Gatekeepers?

Who gets to decide who is a researcher?

Is it the Universities who can recognise you with a PhD certificate?

Is it the research group that ensures their experiments are not replicable, forcing you to join them or start from scratch?

Is it the academic publisher charging exorbitant fees just to access previous research, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel?

Is it the peer-review system that punishes non-native English speakers and anyone who doesn't think like them (or, sometimes outrageously, cite them)?

Who gets to decide whether you are a researcher or not?

By that definition, anyone can be a researcher.

If we let them.

You don't need a PhD certificate. You also don't need to limit yourself through dubious peer-review systems, join closed research groups, or pay millions to access knowledge that's already out there.

The only reason we don't have a world full of independent researchers is this: the current research system is packed with gatekeepers.

But that is changing 😉

No more gatekeeping peer review.

The Publish -> Review -> Curate model has been proposed as a transparent alternative to the current peer-review system. You publish first (and get known for your work). Then your work is peer-reviewed (for the sake of improvement, not rejection). And as the work gets "good enough", it gets curated into journals and conference proceedings.

No more gatekeeping access to knowledge.

An international network of Open Repositories led by Universities, governments, and non-profit Institutions is making pre-print versions of academic papers available for free. That means you don't need to pay academic publishers anymore to have access to previous research.

Instead, authors share their pre-publication versions (that is, the final version before the publisher puts their stamp on it) available for free.

Many people assume all pre-prints are low quality and not peer-reviewed, but that is not the case for pre-prints hosted in institutional repositories. And under the Publish - Review - Curate model, that perception will shift even further.

If that's not enough, there are simpler options for Independent Researchers. Did you know you can write an article in your blog and get a DOI for it? Yes, you can have it recognised as a "proper, citable publication". No academic institution required.

No more gatekeeping reproducible research.

The Reproducible Research movement is pushing back against the longstanding practice of publishing results no one else can replicate. I mean... What does peer review even mean if we can't verify the work actually... works?

The push is coming from several directions:

• ​Executable papers - publications you can run as if they were an app, not just a text you read.
• ​Pre-registration of experiments - so no one "bends the hypotheses to match the results".
• ​Parameter and data tracking - lab researchers have a history of logging every variable in their experiments, as it is hard to just "repeat it all again". Yet, in the digital sciences, we don't have this history. So in the last decade, there has been a push for researchers to keep track of data, parameters, and code changes in digital experiments.

No more gatekeeping recognition.

Last, the PhD certificate.

This remains the hardest barrier to break, partly because the Universities themselves are leading the movement towards Open Research and Open Science.

But progress is happening here too.

​Citizen Science and PPIE (Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement) projects promote the genuine partnership between institutional researchers and members of the public. They recognise citizens as contributors. Yet, the distinction between (proper) "researchers" and "citizen scientists" remains.

That is the barrier I most want to see broken.

I want to see high-quality research done by retirees, intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, freelancers, consultants, ex-academics, teenagers, and stay-at-home parents. And I want society to recognise them as researchers, full stop.

Not by the grace of an honorary degree from a University, but through new credible forms of Research Assessment that measure impact and rigour directly.

That conversation is already happening, and the "Publish or Perish" culture is already cracking.

There has never been a better time to become an independent researcher than right now.

So join me in this journey:

• Activate your curiosity
• Develop your research skills
• Learn from those who came before
• Communicate your findings

Let us show that high-quality research needs no gatekeepers.

May Workshop — Thinking Cafe

Many of my clients struggle to create (and sustain) a personal workflow that holds together both sides of knowledge work:

• organising their notes
• turning those notes into outputs (blog posts, articles, ideas worth sharing)

They either stay in the organisation part "forever", or publish constantly but forget their notes entirely.

On Friday, May 15th, I am running a hands-on workshop on Building a Minimum PKM Workflow.

In one hour, we will walk through a complete end-to-end workflow:

• Reading a source
• Organising your notes
• Writing a blog post based on what you read

You will leave with a repeatable daily workflow. Not just a framework to think about, but a process you can actually use tomorrow.

​Join the Thinking Cafe before May 15th to participate live, or grab the recording afterwards.

From social

• ​Metadata Management: From field-value pairs to Linked Data. A talk I gave at the Open Repositories Ireland event on how technological shifts change the way we describe and structure metadata. Worth a watch if you are into cataloguing, Linked Data, or knowledge organisation.
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• ​Why PKM is really about sense-making, not notes. My talk at the PKM Summit 2026. I introduce my philosophy and explain how "Objects of Attention" reframe the way we think about (and practise) PKM.

Let's chat

Where have you felt the gatekeepers in your own journey — those moments when someone or something told you that you didn't quite qualify?

I would love to hear your story.

Talk soon.