Thing 20: The para-academic: Working on publications when you don’t have an academic research job
- shijiayu
- 4 days ago
- 12 min read
Dr Tristan Harkcom, Researcher Development Training Officer, University of Surrey
Everyone with a doctorate has created something worth sharing, but opportunities to publish your research can be hard to come by, especially after you’ve graduated. In the UK where I work, most new PhD graduates do not go into lecturing roles or post-docs (Vitae, 2022). Even those who do may find that they struggle to find time to revise and publish their doctoral work at the same time as dealing with their commitments to teaching or to a new research project.
This is the position I find myself in. Soon after graduating from my PhD in music, I started in a new role at the University of Surrey designing, delivering and evaluating training and development opportunities for postgraduate researchers. I thoroughly enjoy the job, which I find richly rewarding, but I don’t have any dedicated time within the role to devote to writing and research. Despite this, I want to find ways to share the work I did for my doctorate. I want to hear what other researchers think of it, and I want to share something of the interest and passion for the topic that brought me to it in the first place. The catch is that I’m doing it in my spare time.
I’m by no means alone in this position. One term that’s been used to makes sense of what it means to participate in the academy like this from the fringes or from the outside is ‘para-academic’. If you’re interested in exploring this further, at the end of the blog you’ll find some examples of writing that use the term to understand a broad range of experiences from teaching on short-term contracts to working in administrative or support roles that might previously have been covered by ‘traditional’ academics.
In this Thing, however, I’m going to concentrate on offering some practical advice and personal reflections from my own experience of trying to publish work that I produced during my PhD. To do this, I’m going to take you through four things that I’ve learned while preparing writing from my doctorate for publication outside of my working hours. Before we begin, one note of caution: my own experience sits in a disciplinary tradition in which single-authored publications are the norm and in which it is relatively possible to undertake research without access to the specialist equipment or ethical and governance frameworks that may be especially difficult to access from outside of a university. To try and mitigate this, as I go over the talking points below, I’ll suggest some questions that I think could help you to reflect on how you might encounter these challenges within your own situation.
Eyes on the prize: understand your motivation!
The core challenge of publishing when you don’t have an academic contract is maintaining your perseverance. Preparing manuscripts is hard work. Peer reviewers can be unkind. The path from submission to publication can be slow, and it’s a path that is often littered with rejection.
Dealing with this is one thing when it’s part of how you make a living. But if you’re working towards publication when you aren’t employed on a research contract, you’re the one who bears the costs. You will certainly pay with your time, and you might also pay with your money in travel costs, conference fees, article processing charges and the like. These can really sting, so it’s important to have an idea of what you might be getting in return. In other words, you need to have a clear idea of what’s motivating you to publish. Why will you keep going when the going gets difficult?
Most of us are motivated to at least some extent by a genuine interest in our research. We believe that knowing more about our areas of study and sharing new knowledge contributes to a healthy and vibrant culture of research as well as to society as whole. This is core to what’s kept me engaged. As I rewrite and revise material from my thesis, I continue to learn more about the topic.
Related to this is the fact that publication is basically a social activity. It’s about sharing something we care about with people who have similar interests. In my case, the academic field that I work in has come under extraordinary pressure in the last few years (take a look at these articles by Alexandra Wilson and Ian Pace for the perspectives of two academics on the situation, or browse through some recent statements by the Royal Musical Association). In this context, continuing to publish as a musicologist, even in my spare time, feels like a way of contributing in a small way to the health of the discipline. For others, publishing might be a way to keep up relationships with collaborators and co-authors or to repay some of the gratitude you feel towards your supervisors for the help they gave you during your PhD.
In the last few years, another possible motivation has become more important. You may choose to keep publishing in order to keep your options open for returning to a research job at a later date. Recently, UKRI have emphasised the problems with a narrow ‘traditional’ research career pathway and encouraged the research community break out of linear, undergraduate-to-professor mould (check out this recent blog post). If these efforts bear fruit, it will mean a more porous barrier between Higher Education research and other sectors of the economy. Researchers will transition out of and back into HE at different stages of their career. In this kind of an environment, keeping in touch with your discipline by collaborating with co-authors, by undergoing peer review, by sharing your work at conferences and by publishing is a way to keep future academic roles on the table.
Whatever your motivation is will be unique to you. What’s important is that you have a clear sense of what it is you’re looking to get for your efforts. This will help you keep your energy up when things get tough, and it will help you decide what the right compromises and opportunities for you are (will you publish closed-access to avoid charges? Will you take a day’s holiday to travel to a library where you can chase down a reference you need?).
That said, there is one source of motivation that I don’t think will sustain you in the long run. Everyone who has a doctorate may have created material worth sharing, but I don’t think this creates an obligation for you. If you try and put yourself through the ordeal of getting published and all you have to sustain you is a vague sense that it’s what you ought to do, I’m not sure you’ll find it enough to keep you going.
Questions
Do you identify with any of the motivations for using your spare time to publish that I’ve outlined above? Do you have further reasons of your own?
Are any of the reasons that you outline unhealthy, unrealistic or unsustainable in the long term?
What does your motivation mean for the way you will go about getting published? Will you take more risks or fewer? How will you respond to criticism or rejection? How substantially will you aim revise to revise what you submitted for your thesis?
Time is short—use it wisely!
Time is your most precious resource when it comes to working towards publication outside working hours. You might find that this is the point at which all of the time and project management skills you developed during your PhD really become useful. Finding space to research and write around your job, your social life, day-to-day errands and other commitments is more straightforward if you can be realistic, if you can chunk your projects into discrete tasks effectively and if you can keep track of the tasks you’ve completed and those that still need doing.
At the same time, you might find that the changed situation helps you develop new flexibility or skills. During my PhD, I found it really challenging to focus on writing if I couldn’t switch off my emails and work undisturbed for several hours. I don’t have this luxury now, and I’ve become much better at working towards micro-goals like editing a short passage or sketching out a single paragraph while on a train or in my lunch break.
Either way, it’s a good idea to get buy-in from friends and family, especially from those closest to you. On the one hand, they bear some of the costs of you spending your time this way right along with you. Missed opportunities for socializing, occasional late nights, times when you’re distracted thinking about your work etc. On the other hand, getting friends and family on board with your ambitions can help you hold yourself to account.
Questions
How much time do you have available for rewriting and publishing? What else could you be doing with that time?
What tools or strategies have you used previously to manage your time effectively? How will these need to be adapted to your new situation?
Who might be impacted by your choices around time? How will you discuss this with them?
Know your strategy: How will you find opportunities, and how will they find you?
Developing an effective publication strategy is important whether you’re publishing from inside or outside the academy. If you’re looking to publish from outside, however, it can be especially important. This is because of the additional time pressures and because you may not have access to the kinds of collective publishing agreements that universities often have in place. More than this, you might be looking to gain something fundamentally different from the act of publishing your research than if you were following a ‘traditional’ academic career path.
As a result, you might be rewarded for thinking outside of the box about where and how you will share your research. For example, if you no longer have the advantages and obligations associated with depositing your research in your institution’s repository, it might pay to set up a personal website. You can make the most of green open access by sharing your accepted manuscripts here (but always bear in mind the Ts&Cs of publishers may vary!). Now might also be the best time to consider alternative ways to communicate your research. You will have read about some specific examples in Thing 16, but it can be worthwhile remaining open to a range of possibilities. There will be audiences beyond the academic community of your discipline that you can interest in your research. There will be ways of sharing your research beyond traditional, written scholarly publications.
I suggest you think carefully about the right balance between looking for opportunities actively and passively. Being active by researching journals and book publishers or contacting editors can pay off, but it quickly becomes very time consuming. On the other hand, if you’re prepared to be patient there are a few things that you can do to let the opportunities come to you. I’ve found it really helpful to sign up to some relevant JiscMail lists. In music, academics regularly use them to promote upcoming special issues and new journals or book series. Depending on your discipline, you might find it equally or even more effective to use social media for the same purposes. In general, if you can align your research to a pre-existing project like a special issue, it can mean you have less of a challenge convincing editors of the relevance and timeliness of your topic.
That being said, this comes with one piece of advice and one caveat. First, I advise you to think broadly about what your research relates to. Within a thesis, you undertake a lot of work to try and make a coherent picture or narrative out of what can be a fairly diverse set of studies. Beyond the doctorate, you’re relieved of this burden, and you might find one or more of your chapters can be revised to fit within a quite different trend that is emerging within your field. The caveat is that you need to be on your guard against predatory publishers (broadly, publishers who are looking to profit from researchers and whose editorial standards fall short of the rigour expected of academic publications). One known tactic of these publishers is the misuse of special issues (if you want to know more, may be interested in this blog from Roger Watson or this blog from David Mills and Şefika Mertkan). Many university libraries have public pages offering advice on staying safe from these organizations.
Finally, you’ll have read in Thing 5 about the importance of networking. Don’t forget that your network can also have a role to play in sharing and making opportunities for publication. If you can participate in relevant conferences, especially those where you can keep costs down, it can give you an opportunity to promote the research you are trying to get published to those who will be most interested in reading it once it’s out. If you’re lucky, one of them may even be in a position to invite or encourage a submission to a publication that they edit. To make this work you do have to be open about your ambitions, just as if you are interested in pursuing a career in academia, you’re well advised to be open about this with your supervisor and network nice and early on.
Questions
What are you looking to get out of publishing? What does this mean about how you will try and get published---will you prioritize open access? High impact factor? Close alignment with your research interest? Or something else?
How will you find or create the write opportunities to get published? Do you have manuscripts that are ready to submit? Or will you wait for the right opportunity to come along and then work harder to make your research align with it?
Think creatively about how you will access the resources you need!
When you’re enrolled at a university, it’s easy to take for granted the vast array of resources and support available to you. These include not only services that are readily apparent like labs and libraries, but also the wealth of expertise, opportunities for networking and for testing out your research that you share with your colleagues. Always be sure to make the most of these while you can!
The big challenge for me has been to keep in touch with the literature. I’ve been fortunate to have a job at a university, which gives me access to the university’s library and to other university libraries through the SCONUL access scheme. If you’re not in this position, it can often be possible to retain some degree of access to your previous institutions’ resources. Many universities will confer some form of unpaid associate or visiting researcher status on their PhD graduates. Some also offer continued library membership or continued access to selected journals for alumni. If neither of these are an option or if there are specific articles or books you can’t access, remember that many other university libraries are open, at least partially, to the public. Tools such as WorldCat can help you identify your nearest copy of a key text. If all else fails, don’t be afraid to contact authors directly and ask if they can share a copy of what you’re looking for, at least in manuscript form.
Questions
What would be the biggest barrier to publishing if you weren’t a doctoral student or employed on a research contract? Access to literature? Access to participants? Access to labs? Something else?
How could you fill this gap? Could you make use of publicly available access to institutional resources? Could you cultivate your network (supervisors, collaborators etc.) to help you remain connected with data collection or analysis?
Final thoughts and suggestions for discussion
For me, this is very much an ongoing journey. Some material from my thesis is out for review, but there’s plenty more that I haven’t reworked and submitted yet. Even so, I’m aware that I’m on a path that will eventually hit a crossroads. At some point, I’ll either run out of material or I’ll accept that the material I have left isn’t going to get published. When this happens, I’ll be face with a new---and I think steeper---challenge: find time and resources to produce new research or let go of the ‘researcher’ aspect of my identity. Happily, that’s a question for another day.
For this week’s discussion, I suggest that you begin by reflecting on if and when the themes I’ve touched on might have relevance for your own career as a researcher. Have you already been through a period as an uncontracted researcher? How long might it be before this is relevant to you? Then think back over your answers to the questions I’ve suggested above. If and when the time comes to undertake research outside of your employment, will you take the opportunity and how will you approach making it work?
Further resources and suggested reading
Alexandra Wilson (2025) ‘Universities must face the music.’ The Critic.
Bruce Macfarlane (2010) ‘The Morphing of Academic Practice: Unbundling and the Rise of the Para-academic.’ Higher Education Quarterly, 65, 1 (59–73).
Georgi Krlev and Andre Spicer (2023) For Epistemic Respect – Against Reviewer 2. LSE Impact Blog.
Ian Pace (2025) ‘Cardiff’s music closure will hasten the fading out of UK musical scholarship.’ Times Higher Education.
Jay D. Thompson (2015) Academic writing ‘outside’ academia. The Research Whisperer Blog.
Ottoline Leyser (2025) Valuing difference, driving breakthroughs. UKRI Blog.
The Para-Academic Handbook (2014) Alex Wardrop and Deborah Withers (eds.).
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