How deal with an innovation from outside academia I am self-educated software developer, and I believe I stumbled across something that is both novel and useful. I'm not talking anything large or groundbreaking, but still novel and potentially useful to others. I believe it may be suitable for publication.

The find in itself is related to a publication from 1997, which continues to be somewhat frequently cited (about 30 times per year).

I have found a journal I believe is a very good fit for the material.

I have no access to anyone who has experience in publishing papers or academia in the field. That leaves me with the following stumbling blocks I have to find out on my own:


I lack the overview of the current research in the field. It's nice and good an outsider thinks they have an innovation, but the work may be not novel at all.
Even if it is novel, what I regard as a small but nevertheless interesting and useful find may be regarded as trivial and not publishable by academia.
Even if it wouldn't be, and would be suitable for a paper, without any experience in writing papers, I will likely make all beginners errors, and have nobody to proofread the paper.


What, if anything, can I do to overcome these hurdles?
I would recommend e-mailing the authors of the original paper. (In general contact information for academics can be very easily found via googling.) Briefly explain your discovery and pose your questions.

In general, such e-mails are quite welcome in academia. There is some possibility you might get no response, but I think it is likely that you will get a polite response, and that the authors will be encouraging and helpful if your work is worth publishing.

If you don't want to do much of the grunt work yourself, you may be able to coauthor the paper with the authors and/or others whom the authors might put you in touch with. (But don't propose this until you get an initial positive response.)

Good luck!