Can research rejected by journals has any chances being accepted if it is disseminated by the social media? [closed]

Question

I know it may sound somewhat out-of-order (if not outright crazy) to suggest it, but has anybody tried to use sites like Mendeley or the arXiv or some "social media" where you can upload PDFs to spread his or hers research even before publication? Has it ever been successful?

I know many scientists make profiles in diverse social medias to upload PDFs of their work (at least the ones they are allowed to) but I wonder how effective can it be if some "outsider" do the same? If I just create a Mendeley account and/or group and upload several PDFs there, write a short description what I am dealing with and the problems I face finding the right audience, do you think anybody will notice them or am I just making my situation worse? Do you think it will work? Or uploading them to the arXiv? Or just making a Google+ account? Or anything of this kind of "group sharing" of PDFs? I'm talking about papers turned away from journals because they are outside-scope and the journal is having problems to find proper experts to review them or outright deciding it isn't worth it to expand in this field. The more time passes the more I feel like I'm create a new field here and since it is brand new no journal is well-adjusted to take on it. Don't think I'm intentionally running away from the peer-review because I want to smear the academia. If enough people agree to at least view them (I'm not talking about agreeing with them just saying that there is something of a worth in them) can it spread enough to cause at least one journal to review it seriously? Can such a "buzz" strategy manage to spread awareness of an issue even if no one wants to publish it?

P.S.Please, be considerate to me and just tell me should I try it or not. Don't judge me, please, I'm just considering my options. I just want to reach somebody who can take me seriously, not get pushed back by the system because the reviewers can take the no-scope option.

P.S.2.What I am trying to publish s a paper laying the foundation of a brand new concept how complexity can arise. One which (as far as I know-I can't claim I have read everything about complexity which has ever been published-as you may know this is so HUGE field one can never claim such thing even if he reads about it all his life) contains ideas never researched before and has to include by basic thesis (3-5 pages of my core concepts) and a particular example how they are used. If I can get even one paper with the core in any journal, it will be very easy to start submitting many other papers in other journals citing it. Then I will be within the scope of these journals, but the big problem is this first one I must get in. I simply need a place which can accept my methodology and core ideas together with my example but it's this methodology which is so hard to understand and put in scope anywhere!

Answer 1

Try conferences instead

You seem to have an underlying goal of getting in touch with researchers. Writing papers is not a good way to do this and "social media" for papers, like Mendeley, Arxiv etc are paper-centred. You don't get to know people there and "feedback", which is a social interaction, will be scarce.

If you have the guts for it, you should instead try to submit your work to an academic conference. Conferences typically only review your abstract prior to the conference. If your talk is accepted you may get to stand before an audience, present your work and get feedback, however harsh. You may also be relegated to a "poster session" where you put up your research on a wall and hope people come up and look at it. This too involves direct contact with researchers.

Note that rather than present all your postulates, you should give a birds-eye view of your project. What are you trying to accomplish, where are you heading, what is the main gist of the postulates? If you think this is hard, spare a thought for mathematicians working on the "Langlands project", trying to explain what they do.

Some conferences will also publish a conference proceeding, with or without peer-review. This gives you a chance at "real" publishing.

When choosing your conference, forum or workshop, you should consult the proceedings from past years and look for a good match. You say that you have some core postulates that overlap both science and philosophy. It sounds like you are looking for something on the "theory of science", but other keywords may apply too. See for instance http://ccs17.unam.mx/ for a receptive audience on interdisciplinary "complexity science".

A word of advice on getting accepted:

The first question people will have about your postulate is: How does this relate to [insert a century's worth of work on the topic]. Researchers want to see you put your work into the context of the work of others. The bad thing is that you may have to read up on Norbert Wiener, Prigogine, W. Ross Ashby, John Sterman, John Casti, Stuart Kauffman, Konrad Zuse, Maturana & Valera, Max Tegmark, highlights from the Santa Fe complex systems group and even Stephen Wolfram to answer such questions. The good news is that at the end of it, you will be in a much better position to select the right conference or even journal for you.

Answer 2

In my experience, even peer-reviewed publications are rarely read. There are a handful of influential papers in each field (from what I have seen) which are read and cited. But beyond these, a lot of work is only cited to keep people happy.

Therefore, I think that the chances of people reading the work without it being peer-reviewed are very slim.

If you want your work to get reviewed and it is being rejected before being read (this is what you're saying, I think), then you perhaps need co-authors that know the field better.

Answer 3

One part of your question is very easy to answer:

If enough people agree to at least view them can it spread enough to cause at least one journal to review it seriously?

Journals only consider papers submitted to them. They will not review your work because it is popular on social media.

Answer 4

I'm sorry to say that I do not think your idea will get much traction as far as spreading your work or results. The unfortunate reality is that most researchers already struggle to filter out "the noise", i.e. try to avoid reading unhelpful manuscripts, and peer-reviewed literature is one efficient way to do this. ArXiv is not peer-reviewed: not everybody goes there and - given the volume of submissions - it is unlikely that your paper will get widely noticed unless you are already well-known in your field of research.

Placing papers on social media works if you want to give post-publication access to articles behind a paywall, but if your manuscript has been rejected it's very unlikely to generate any "buzz": rejected papers have an infinitesimal chance of going "viral".

I believe the right audience will almost certainly be found by submitting to the right journal. For all its faults the peer-review process is overall fair (at least in my field), in the sense that good contributions are usually eventually recognized and published, even if significant corrections are sometimes required (see here for the perspective from a different field). I am not aware of reasonable contributions that are systematically rejected because of technicalities, i.e. I do not believe in conspiracy theories about small biased cliques controlling enough journals in a field to prevent serious work from being published. Presumably one can find anecdotal exceptions but I cannot imagine this is the rule.