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Barry_Cotter comments on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently - Less Wrong
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I think your impression is wrong. You are right that in many areas, if you're reasonably smart and have a strong amateur interest, it doesn't take very much time and effort to start asking questions and possibly even generating insight at the same level as accredited scholars. However, in such areas, and in many others as well, the most difficult obstacles are of different sorts.
First, a perfectly clear, logical, honest, and readable account of your work is often ipso facto unpublishable: what is required is writing according to unofficial, tacitly acknowledged rules that are extremely hard to figure out on your own. (If anything, academic publishing is so competitive that unless you have an earth-shattering breakthrough, it is difficult or even impossible to publish without intensely optimizing for passing the actual review and editorial process, rather than following some idealistic criteria of quality.)
Second, of course, there is the factor of brand-names, networking, and patronage. Each publication venue has some minimal status threshold for authors and their affiliation, below which your chances of publication are practically nil no matter what the content of your paper may be. (Again, with the possible hypothetical exception of evident stunning breakthroughs.)
I agree. I wasn't saying that anyone will pay attention to what you get published, (but IIRC from a Vassar comment somewhere, most tenured academics outside top departments don't get any attention either.)
I didn't say that you could published in top field journals after six months work, but I suspect that in at least some fields that would be possible, albeit maybe only in low quality journals. Without a doubt you need to conform to the unpublished as well as the public criteria for publication; otherwise you might as well do it as a blogpost. But if you can't figure out those criteria on your own there are still grad students and professors at low prestige universities who might co-author with you if you've got the start of something publishable and are persistent with enough of them.
Do you have any specific evidence on the prestige factor? Double blind peer review would seem to argue against this but then again papers are often refused before reaching this stage as "not suitable for us".
Getting papers published is probably not the most efficient way of spreading knowledge, except in highly technical fields where the criteria are likely to be relatively transparent and high anyway, but it would make getting into a graduate programme substantially easier, and might be worthwhile for other purposes.
Well, clearly, I can't give any anecdotal evidence with too much detail in public. I'll just say that "prestige" is probably the most diplomatic term one might choose to use there.
Regarding double-blind review, it has always seemed to me as a farce. Any particular research community is a small world, so how can you possibly be competent to review a paper if you can't guess who the author might be based on the content and the work it builds on? Then, of course, there are the editors, who know everything, whose discretion is large, and who can often drop hints to the reviewers one way or another.