Research judged on who its author is its own merit.

We believe in the spirit of double-blind review. By the same logic, age is not a measure of a researcher’s worth. Open-Age Academia exists to name that barrier, and to break it down.

What we do

Age is not a measure of a researcher’s worth.

We believe in the spirit of double-blind review, that research should be judged on its own merit, not on who its author is. By the same logic, we believe age should be no different.

Yet in practice, a lack of information and outdated conventions keep prepared young researchers outside academia. Submission systems, conference policies, and funding rules quietly assume an age and an affiliation that a serious young researcher may not have.

Open-Age Academia works to lower that barrier. We collect the practical information a young researcher needs to submit and get funded on their own, and we make the case, plainly, that prepared work deserves a fair read.

Resource

List of academias that are open to youth researchers

A starting list of venues and programs that judge submissions on merit, without an institutional affiliation requirement. We keep it current, so suggest additions by email.

See the full list ↗
Joun Won
Story of Joun Won

How a Kid Who Loved AI Made It to a NeurIPS Workshop @17

A teacher once told his class that high schoolers can’t write papers. Co-founder of Open-Age Academia, he writes about what happened after that, from a Stanford lecture in an airport to a NeurIPS workshop submission at 17.

Read the story ↗

What we actually do

Right now we’re keeping track of which venues actually let you submit without an institutional email or a supervisor’s sign-off, and for the ones that don’t — figuring out what actually works to get around it.

Real stories from people who’ve already done this. What they did, what got in the way, how they got past it.

And we work to help other institutions open up the same way.

Meet the team behind it