Doing science without an institution
No grant, no department, no ethics board reading over my shoulder. That changes what I’m free to study — and it changes what I owe in return.
Independent research removes a lot of friction. I choose the questions, set the schedule, and report what I find without negotiating it past a grant cycle or a committee with its own priorities. For questions this specific and this under-funded, that freedom is most of why the work happens at all.
It also removes a lot of structure. There is no IRB to catch a design flaw, no co-authors to argue with, no institutional name on the line if I get sloppy. The checks an institution provides by default, I have to build by hand.
So I substitute process for oversight. Protocols are registered before measurement, raw data and code are published, identity is anchored to a stable ORCID record, and every study links back to where its data actually lives. The public, time-stamped trail is the thing standing in for the committee.
I am also clear-eyed about what self-funding cannot buy: scale, blinding, and independence from my own stake in the outcome. Naming those limits is part of the deal. Independence is a real method, not a shortcut around rigor — if anything it asks for more of it.