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I have some research ideas and concepts. But I have no time to proceed with them. So I would like to share them with relevant research institutions for further developments.

I don't expect any financial benefit. But if they include my name in publications it will helpful for my career path. That's all I expect by sharing them.

Let me know, if my it is possible, if it is possible how could I contact them. Most of my concepts are based on renewable energy technologies,power,energy storing and power balancing.

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Lakmal
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1 Answers1

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It's practically impossible for the following reason:

Ideas have very little value by themselves. The chances that they are original is very low and it's the rigorous test of their validity along with informed discussion about why they work that is worth publishing. Hence, you will struggle to find someone willing to do all the work but share credit.

I don't expect any financial benefit.

Good, because you won't get any, for reasons similar to the ones given above.

Note that it's also unethical because "sharing an idea" is not enough to claim authorship of a paper.

Cape Code
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  • Not unethical to share the idea, or to credit the idea's source, but arguably unethical to credit that ax "authorship" unless the idea's exceptional. Note that this is different from how patents are handled, where the idea often is given as much credit as its development. – keshlam Jun 14 '15 at 14:56
  • Thanks for your answer sir.So let me know if I can publish my concept in a journal as a concept pointing out it's potentials. Although they are concepts I know they are really working and easily understandable. – Lakmal Jun 14 '15 at 15:00
  • @keshlam authorship implies active participation to the study and the writing of the paper. So just an idea, however exceptional it might be, still does not warrant authorship. Patents (at least in Europe) also require a formal demonstration of how the idea works. – Cape Code Jun 14 '15 at 15:12
  • Granted, but patents issued to companies (at least in the US) often give equal credit to everyone who contributed substantially to the disclosure, whether they originated the concept, helped enlarge upon it, helped prove it practical, wordsmithed the patent application, or some combination of the above. (Speaking from experience.) – keshlam Jun 14 '15 at 15:19
  • I think many of the points in this answer are broadly reasonable but are stated way too strongly. For instance: "Ideas have very little value by themselves." If by that you mean that the average value of an idea is low: yes. But if you mean that the maximum possible value is low: this is ridiculously false; some ideas have changed the world and/or revolutionized entire academic fields. "'Sharing an idea' is not enough to claim authorship of a paper." Also way too strong: the kind of idea that makes a breakthrough paper possible seems to me to be definitively worth coauthorship. – Pete L. Clark Jun 14 '15 at 21:02
  • If you could freely use someone else's ideas without including them as a coauthor, then academic integrity would be strained to the breaking point. I wonder why several people here seem so insistent on the low value of ideas. My own opinion is as follows: suppose I have a friend or colleague that I want to support. Suppose that every year I give them one idea, the one that I have reason to believe is my best one, though (say) I have not written anything down to support that thought. – Pete L. Clark Jun 14 '15 at 21:06
  • My feeling is that by doing this I would be giving my friend a mighty gift, perhaps larger than the (sometimes substantial) support that I actually give to my students and postdocs. My friend would have to be very capable and have skills very close to my own to suitably develop these ideas, but if that were the case the amount of support given this way would in fact be ethically problematic: one academic should not be able to entirely appropriate another's ideas in this way. – Pete L. Clark Jun 14 '15 at 21:09
  • @PeteL.Clark I admit I have a tendency to see things with a statistical/economical perspective. In that sense, there is no shortage of ideas, including very good ones. What I mean is an idea like 'We should build space elevators!' is not worth a lot compared to 'I have made these rigorous calculations/experiments about the strength of carbon nanotubes that could, maybe, constitutes wires going from Earth to Space'. – Cape Code Jun 15 '15 at 07:14
  • "We should build space elevators!" is not to me a clear example of a very good idea. Since you mention economics, I would suggest instead Nash equilibrium, more specifically (i) the insight that it is a useful and important definition and (ii) the existence can be reduced to standard topological fixed point theorems. The original paper contains no more than these two insights: it is a page long and contains no nontrivial implementations of any kind, e.g. calculations or experiments: http://www.pnas.org/content/36/1/48.full.pdf. – Pete L. Clark Jun 15 '15 at 12:05
  • As an example in statistics, I would suggest the embryonic form of the law of large numbers given by Cardano. No formalism or implementation was supplied, nor could it be at the time by Cardano (or anyone else), but he published his idea anyway and the influence that it had on later workers was enormous. I cannot think of any reasonable sense in which there is "no shortage" of ideas of the Nash/Cardano quality, so I still don't really understand what you mean. – Pete L. Clark Jun 15 '15 at 12:18