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Within the world of Danish academia, it is possible for a researcher to be ‘hosted’ by an academic institution (frequently the Royal Library) without being officially employed there. The Danish term for such a position is domicileret (forsker) ‘domiciled (researcher)’.

These ‘domiciled’ researchers are granted permission to do research and given access to collections, copiers, and sometimes even offices on an equal footing to regular researchers, who are employed by the institution and have a contract with them; but unlike tenured researchers, ‘domiciled’ researchers are not paid by the institution, and their research is owned entirely by themselves with no copyright falling to the institution.

Currently, the publisher I work for is publishing an English book where the author is a ‘domiciled’ researcher for the Royal Library. This must be mentioned in the author blurb on the back cover, but we’re having trouble coming up with a good English term that fits and, more importantly, has actual currency in English-speaking academic circles.

A few possibilities have occurred to me, but Googling them yields varied hits from various spheres, and it’s hard to determine whether any of them really have any actual currency—or indeed if they actually refer to a different concept. The main contenders I’ve been able to come up with are:

  • Untenured researcher at the Royal Library
    Seems to be an exact and accurate description, but untenured is slightly ambiguous (it can refer both to not having any kind of tenure at all—i.e., not being employed—or to having a non-permanent, time-limited post) and has a slightly negative sound to it

  • Independent researcher at the Royal Library
    Seems a slightly less accurate description (‘domiciled’ researchers are, after all, not entirely independent, in that they have a dependency relationship with their ‘domiciler’), but sounds quite natural to me, and independent has decidedly positive connotations

Is there an established term used in English academia to describe this kind of position/researcher?

Janus Bahs Jacquet
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  • Resident... comes to mind – mplungjan May 18 '15 at 13:02
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    Guest researcher? : http://www.nist.gov/tpo/collaborations/guestresearchers.cfm –  May 18 '15 at 13:05
  • I like guest vis-a-vis domiciled but it could be mistaken for a post that involved an honorarium or stipend of some kind, as in guest speaker. – TimR May 18 '15 at 13:08
  • @Josh61 That particular example does seem to fit rather well, but in general, I would understand a guest researcher as someone who is temporarily affiliated with a particular institution (in the same way the ‘local’ tenured researchers are), but has a more permanent affiliation with a different institution. We have a guest researcher at my department at uni, for example, and he has a contract with the department and is paid by them—he’s only a guest researcher because he is here for two years only, after which he’ll go back to Leiden where he normally works. – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 18 '15 at 13:09

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In the US we use the term independent scholar but it does not imply any particular institutional relationship or set of access/use permissions.

TimR
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  • That’s what I understand by independent scholar/researcher, too. My hope was that adding at the Royal Library would add a layer of institutional relationship to the basic notion of independent (i.e., non-affiliated) research. – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 18 '15 at 13:07
  • Not sure if a simple at would produce the effect your hope for. – TimR May 18 '15 at 13:11
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    https://apps.nationalarchives.gov.uk/irlist/ – TimR May 18 '15 at 13:15
  • Nor am I, really. But could it be understood in any other way? An independent scholar/researcher is normally explicitly not affiliated with any institution, and thus are not researchers at anywhere at all. What other possible ways would there be of understanding a description that someone is an independenct scholar/researcher at [Institution]? – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 18 '15 at 13:16
  • I think the choice is between "at" or "with". I think "with" conveys the idea of unaffiliated affiliation that you're after. – TimR May 18 '15 at 13:17
  • Yes, I was vacillating between the two as well. With implies a stronger link between the researcher and the institution, and I wasn’t quite sure whether that would be good or bad here—we don’t want to imply actual employment either. (And very good find, that National Archives page! Seems fairly similar to the situation here: you find an independent researcher, get them some funding somehow, and the researcher then works at the National Archives without being officially affiliated with them.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 18 '15 at 13:20
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    The combination of the term of trade independent researcher and the preposition with should offset the false impression each might give. – TimR May 18 '15 at 13:22
  • @Tim Romano: You'd think so, but unfortunately it sounds self-contradictory— an oxymoron. – Brian Hitchcock May 19 '15 at 08:34
  • @Brian Hitchcock: I like unaffiliated research affiliate best. – TimR May 19 '15 at 10:40