Now, since leaving academia, I have by no means lost interest in science. If anything, I've followed the world of research with as much interest and attention as ever and, because I no longer have to play the perpetual game of one-upmanship that pervades academic departments, I have been free to spread my interest around to more diverse topics. It's been rather freeing.
At the same time, my paycheck depends on delivering code, and so I've delivered code and not academic papers. Then, something interesting happened: I splurged on a Claude subscription and suddenly I have the most attentive research assistant I could have imagined all without the need for an academic department or drawn-out grant proposal process.
The only hurdle remaining is: where should I publish? Unfortunately, as I don't have an academic affiliation, I cannot get automatic access to publish to arXiv (and anyone I know who could endorse me is focused in on the biological sciences subjects from my time in grad school, not cs.LG). I've thought about simply posting to GitHub and linking from my personal site, but I worry if that's enough to establish priority and/or garner real critique and feedback.
I'm contemplating PLOS One, but I don't know the ML community well enough to know if that's an appropriate venue? Any help on how to re-enter the world of scientific publishing (in a new area) would be much appreciated!
From these experiences, we actually got the opportunity to interview for fellowship positions, which we are considering. I think given your PhD in a hard science, you could link up with people that are interested in similar research as you are and then from there figure out where you want to publish.