First of all, I have a PhD and fully believe that many AskHistorians flairs without one are every bit my intellectual and historiographical equals or betters.

So, setting aside knowledge and skill:

In terms of academic conferences, articles, and books (not pop history magazine articles or books), there are two major obstacles for non-grad students and professors (or similar jobs) that would be very hard to overcome.

The first is time. The idea behind academic publishing is that you are making a new argument--something that has never been said before. It might be something trivial AF or in such a specialized field that three other people will care, but it needs to be something new.

That means you have to know the field--not just the smallest niche, but the scholarship on its context--fairly well to really well. And the reading for that will probably take a lot of time to get up to speed on things. Heck, even figuring out what you have to read takes up a lot of time.

That's a big advantage to writing a master's thesis or a PhD dissertation: you get a solid sense in the current scholarship of your broader topic and the narrower ones that you're drawing on. Say you write your dissertation on Hildegard of Bingen's apocalyptic prophecies. Now you've got a pretty good awareness of Hildegard scholarship and medieval eschatology scholarship. You probably start writing articles related to Hildegard topics, or branch out from apocalyptic stuff.

And you can do this because with grad school or with a prof job, you have the time to do it.

The second, and much bigger, problem for non-academics is access to sources. Maybe things will change in the future, but it won't be soon. Even with extra-legal means (which I cannot recommend, of course), you cannot get all of the sources you will need from the Internet. You need access to an academic library and to online resources. What you can't get in person, you probably need an academic librarian or interlibrary loan team to contact a different academic library to send you the book or a PDF of the article.

Depending on your field and topic, there's also the money problem--travel to archives being the biggest one there. You probably won't have access to grants, and you definitely won't have department funds to win (although those are getting rarer and rarer).

I don't want to give a hard and fast "no," especially with the rise of digital histories as a field. But there are some pretty big roadblocks for non-academics to participate.

And, of course, whether most academic publishing is actually worth it or matters in any meaningful way--those are different questions entirely.

I would like to clear up two misconceptions.

First, fewer PhDs today is a reflection of massive overproduction for more than a decade, plus a decline in number of tenured positions. However, there isn’t an absolute decline over jobs - there’s still a long line to do temporary teaching gigs at pretty much every level of academia. I just hired a research assistant and had 99 applicants, many with phds. This is for basically an MA-level job.

Second, journals serve the professional needs of authors, not the other way around. There isn’t a fixed demand for academic writing. Indeed, the economics are based on unpaid labor at every level. And the vast majority of academic writing, including history, is never read. Just as there are too many history phds, there are too many history journals. There will be no shortage of academics writing for journals any time soon and if that occurred, those journals will shutter rather than publish work for those who aren’t inside the discipline. The whole point is to create and confer legitimacy on each other.

If you feel passionately about writing in academic history journals, I’d encourage you to reflect on who you want to influence with your work. If you want to influence the history field, you almost certainly need a PhD (as someone else mentioned, partly for the time but also for the legitimacy) and you need to play the ten year lottery of getting a tenured job - this is not a meritocracy at the end of the day and does require lots of luck in addition to skill.

If you just want to write, can also write for magazines and other types of publications. Anyone can query agents with book proposals. If I met a brilliant budding scholar today who was a great writer and dedicated to a life as a writer, my advice would be to build a platform through social media and popular press stuff and run with that to get a book contract, write for film and television and otherwise hustle as much as possible. All that might lead you to an actual readership and impact beyond the discipline.

As for predictions about the future of academia, I think we are witnessing a modest correction following fifty years of growth. Most people are still committed to the idea of university education as a right of passage of building block of citizenship. The chief competitors, trade/ apprenticeships and for profit / online stuff, are not acceptable alternatives for most people. People will willingly enter decades’ worth of crippling debt just for a name on the cv. Academia is on solid foundations and can withstand some contraction.

Good luck!

Part 1:

Hi! I think U/sunagainstgold has posted a good summary coming at it from an academic perspective but I thought I could contribute as someone who used to work (moving out of the industry) in academic publishing. Two quick caveats - I worked at a prestigious University Press in its academic (not trade) books section - so this isn't quite pitched in the same place as your question but should be helpful.

The short answer it is not impossible but it is incredibly unusual and you'd need to really distinguish yourself to publish research at that level without a PhD. In the time I worked there only one academic book was co-authored by someone who did not have a PhD, and they were a) affiliated with Oxford in an unusual way (no PhD but some kind of teaching role, not sure exactly but they hadn't been committed to research for their whole career) b) affiliated with the British Academy c) working within a very small niche d) had published articles previously and e) was about 70. That's is pretty rare combination that this particular author had really worked hard for their entire working life to achieve.

There are a lot of reasons for this from a publishing perspective. But just so you are aware, this is basically how the reviewing and commissioning process works for academic books:

Step 1 - Write the book (unless you are a well established and respected author who can get by on chapter samples or book proposals, you will have to come to the publisher with a finished MS) (also figure out how your are going to fund the research and time off without university/research institute affiliation because it is NOT cheap).

Step 2 - Get the MS, proposal, and your CV in front of a Publisher's Commissioning Editor. IF (and only if) they don't reject you out of hand, the CE will then get it reviewed by several academics specialising in the field your writing on.

Step 3 - These academics will look at all of this (including your CV) and write a full report on whether or not they think it is suitable for publication. (You will get to see these but they will be anonymous).

Step 4 - On the basis of this, the CE's knowlege of the market and the field, they will make a decision on whether they to a) reject you (bad luck, think about some edits and start again), b) ask you to rewrite sections before a another review (which doesn't mean you won't still get rejected), or offer you a contract.

Step 5 - Sign the contract (after reading it very carefully), give them the MS and then go through all the bullshit of having it copy edited, typeset, and proofread.

Ok, so now back to the question - at each stage, how will not having a PhD hurt you?

Stage 1 - See u/sunagainstgold's answer. You're trying to do, without proper training, something that many academics don't achieve until they are already quite far into their career. You are going to be at a big skills disadvantage compared to even a mediocre professional historian. That's not something that is impossible to overcome but realistically you will struggle to compete to produce material that is as high in quality and as timely.

Add onto that funding issues. If you don't have a PhD you are going to find it virtually impossible to find any funding body willing to support you and you will be surprised how expensive researching and writing a book can be. People can get grants of hundreds of thousands of pounds for a single research project and still be short before they've finished their book. Then you need to figure out how you are going to get time off work to research it; Academics, who will find it comparatively easy to take a sabbatical, will still take years to finish a book.

See Part 2: