How to submit a paper without being backed up by my employer By day I am employed (as a research engineer) at CEA, LIST in France (near Paris) working (in 2020) on Bismon (funded by CHARIOT, about cybersecurity). My work contract is under French law (legally some contrat de travail à durée indeterminée) and I am a French citizen.
On my spare time, at home only and with my personal computer equipment, I am developing with others the RefPerSys open source artificial intelligence system.
We would like to submit some paper about it to ICAAINN 2021 (a conference in Paris, France).
The conference submission website requires mentioning some institution.
I don't want to mention my employer for something I am not paid for doing.
If the paper was accepted I have both enough money and enough vacation to go presenting it.
What institution should I put in the web form for something done at home (and improving my old PhD ideas)?
&quot;Independent Scholar&quot; or &quot;Independent Researcher&quot; is the way to go (as also mentioned by Arno in the comments).
According to LENS, the affiliation &quot;Independent Scholar&quot; seems to be slightly more prevalent than &quot;Independent Researcher&quot;, with 3.085 versus 2.426 occurrences between 2015 and the end of Nov. 2020.
(Just for the record, the term &quot;Independent Scientist&quot; was used only 31 times in the same date range; and the earlier centuries' label &quot;Gentleman Scientist&quot; seems to be completely outdated by now.)
Here at Academia StackExchange, there is also an independent-researcher tag (here).