I have been invited to publish an article in an Elsevier scientific journal. After investing in this topic time, money, passion and dedication for five years, this is a great honour and confirmation that what I found out is valuable to others! So, I need to make time to focus on the final checks and writing.

However, I am a freelancer and have to constantly look for assignments to stay afloat. So far I have put my money where my mouth is, and pursued this research entirely with my own resources. This is because the government subsidies do not support independent freelance research, and there is nothing to earn from publishing a scientific article.

Every voluntary contribution now (>€5, anything that floats your boat) helps me free up the time to pursue this opportunity head-on. Your name will be gratefully acknowledged in the article as a funding source. A little piece of research will see the light and contribute to helping specialists interpret their calculation (I will try to explain this below in this page). Reading and downloading the article will be free of charge!

VISION

• A piece of original research will be peer-reviewed, published and downloadable free of charge for anyone in a reputable Elsevier journal. The explainer below tells more about what this means.
• The name of you donors will be gratefully mentioned in the article as funding sources, unless you prefer to donate anonymously.
• The work will not be buried in a drawer. Before submission I will upload the draft of the article to an open access repository. I keep you posted about the milestones of the publication process through this donation page.

EXPLAINER

The long read starts here. I wrote 'Help me to the finish line after 5 years of unpaid research and publish a scientific article I have been invited to write’. Next I explain in four parts what it means along the broad lines. To read about the content of the article please scroll down to the bottom. Stories take time. I write myself all that you read, I do not use ChatGPT.

1. What does ‘publishing a scientific article’ actually mean? 
   You have possibly being writing a scientific article (also known as paper) when you have had an idea about a specific topic, developed that idea out thoroughly, and written a document explaining your reasoning from start to finish. However, some other conditions apply. Your starting point  must be existing knowledge about something. Your end point must say something new about that thing. The reasoning you carry out between start and finish must follow the best standards of the field. Typically this also means carrying out your writing in the expected order.
   
   Writing is not yet publishing. First, someone else must check that all is order. So, you submit your document (also known as manuscript or preprint) to a journal. The journal is a periodical dedicated to your topic (kind of magazine). The journal receives your document and forwards it to a few experts in the field. These experts read your work and then recommend improvements (a tail of work for you), rejection (try another journal) or publication (yes, there will be readers!). These checks are called peer-reviewing.
   
   There are several business models behind scientific publications. They hinge on two objectives: the publishers should get no losses, the authors (like me) should get no revenues. Normally either the authors pay to publish or the readers pay to read. Sounds crazy? It is a bit so. I will not earn anything out of it. The good news is: the journal in point is open-access which means that everyone will be free to download the articles. This guarantees maximum distribution.
   
   I have already been busy writing this article since last summer. You can trust I am not out of my depth with writing. This is a list of my past publications.
   
   What does an article look like? That depends on the field. First of all, do not confuse it with an article in a magazine or newspaper. A scientific article can range from a few pages to a few tens of pages long. It can contain tables, graphs, pictures and anything that supports its conclusions. Of course, people outside the field are likely to find it hard to understand. I try to outline what this study is about at the bottom of the page.
    
2. What does ‘being invited to write an article’ actually mean?
   Normally you look at your own work and pick a journal that finds it relevant (there are thousands of them!). Alternatively, the opposite can happen: the journal recognises you have something to say and invites you to write something about it. That's what is happening to me now. Receiving an invite is a confirmation that you are on something worth sharing and, of course, is very flattering. Well… provided the invitation comes from a journal that actually exists and has a proven reputation (unfortunately, with the business models sketched above, this is not the case all the time).
   
   Luckily, all signs of trustworthiness are green in my case. The journal has been around for years and the publisher is the well-known Elsevier. The journal is called Computational Particle Mechanics. Also, I have been invited to publish in this journal because I had already presented my ideas at a conference last summer. The journal editors were there, listened to my presentation and know that we are already in the ballpark. Obviously, the journal covers the topics discussed at the conference. And the article will be downloadable free of charge for anyone!
   
   These are the best guarantees that this donation is about work that makes sense for more readers than just me and my cat. Of course, the topic is specialised (more at the page bottom) but a publication like this is a unique way to distribute the work done for many years to come at no cost for readers.
   
   The challenge is that writing the article is not just repeating what has been said at the conference, but checking it and developing it. So the hard work is not finished yet.
    
3. What does ‘5 years of unpaid research’ actually mean?
   Long story short: all along I have put my money where my mouth is.
   
   I discovered the ‘stuff of the article’ (more at the page bottom) step by step without a specific goal in mind. The journal’s invitation is a wonderful confirmation that independent research can produce valid, original results.
   
   Let me outline how research is funded normally. Research sounds like a noble word but is a human activity that consumes time and resources. Money is needed. If you work at a university, research is paid with grants supported by taxpayers or by interested stakeholders. If you work in a company, research can be paid by clients who ask questions or can be an investment to keep the company competitive. If you are a freelance and have an independent line of research, you are on your own.
   
   In the Netherlands (at least) you can apply for government grants only if you work at a university, whereas I am a freelancer. That avenue is closed. Pitching my ideas at a company, assuming they see a reason for financial support, could compromise the independence and accessibility of my work. I would have not wanted to lose that. Let alone that applying and pitching draws from the time for looking for and delivering the assignments to pay the mundane bills.
   
   So I have funded this research with my own funds. What is the story of these 5 years? 
   
   In 2021, after the end of my position at Delft University of Technology, I still had access to the university computers for six months. I suggested to my ex-employer that we use that time to calculate a large set of results and upload them online. Anyone in the world without our fast computers could download and study those results. The video shared in this page shows that work. After five years, those datasets are still available online and are among the top downloads produced in Delft. In 2024, the jury (and not friends and family) nominated those datasets as finalists for the Dutch Data Prize. We did not win, fair enough, but we were very pleased to be selected from 50+ candidates. This year I also presented the story of the datasets at a conference in the Netherlands to invite more people in my field to do the same.
   
   In 2022, I flew to a conference in Italy and presented the first descriptions of the 2021 data, in collaboration with a guru in the field. In 2024, I took the train to Germany to attend the same conference and listen. In 2025, I flew to Spain for the same conference and presented new results, those for which I have received the invitation to submit to a journal. The presentation is here.
   
   These activities costed registration fees, travel, accommodation, meals and did not continue into holidays. Above all, they took months of time on task to plan the study, perform the calculations, make sense of the results, write the proposal for the conference presentation, write the conference research report, and compose the presentation. In almost all cases, after the events I uploaded presentations and texts to the public repository Zenodo where those works have been viewed and downloaded free of charge.
   
   I invested, worked and shared. This all happened to stay true to one mission point of Watermotion's, my enterprise: advance understanding. I put my money where my mouth is.
    
4. What does ‘help to the finish line’ actually mean?
   The article must be submitted in March 2026 and the following exchanges with the peer-reviewers will take more weeks. This is how I set up this this fundraiser:
   
   What kind of campaign is this? 
   Beside ‘research’, ‘book publishing’ is the closest category available in Steunactie. In fact it goes about publishing a single article in a respectable peer-reviewed journal. I will not earn anything because of the publication. This is just how it goes with scientific publishing. The article will be open-access, that is, anyone will be able to legally download the published article free of charge.
   
   Who gets the money? 
   I am a self-employed (freelancer, zzp'er). This fundraiser is for Watermotion | Waterbeweging, the company under which I carry my work. Please look at the company description in this page.
   You are donating to Watermotion, not to me as a person. Watermotion pays for the processing charges, your donations count as revenue, and Watermotion will also pay income tax on them.
   
   Why that much money?
   The target amount of €6900 corresponds to the legal minimum for the gross hourly wage in the Netherlands times 3 months of 4 weeks of 5 working days of 8 hours each. 
   This calculation was just to set a reasonable baseline. The hourly rate is the lowest allowed in the Netherlands and 40-hour week underestimates the workload. Watermotion will also pay income tax on the donation. So that target amount is also a gross amount.
   Any donation upwards of €5 is permitted and is appreciated. Every little helps.
   
   What do I use this money for?
   To buy own time and not stuff. For so-called operational expenditures only. I will use the donations to ease the pressure of the preoccupations of finding new paid assignments.
   Writing down the draft, setting up calculations, checking results, responding in the peer-review process and so forth will take a lot of time when done as one should.
   Also, publishing the article is free of charge because the publisher has waived the publication fees for the invited articles linked to the conference of 2025, like mine. Normally they would want from authors upwards of $2000! This is an exceptional opportunity.
   
   What can you ask after donating?
   Not much, but that's normal. Donations are gifts without any return considerations (donaties zonder tegenprestatie).
   In particular, they entail no influence on the thinking, writing and reviewing process. This is a strict requirement of integrity for scientific publications which I want to uphold.
   I am also obliged (and very pleased) to acknowledge in the article all funding support received. All named donors will be mentioned gratefully in print. Please donate anonymously if you prefer not. If you change your mind about being thanked publicly let me know using the contact button in this webpage.
   Finally, Watermotion is not a charitable organisation (ANBI, in the Netherlands) so your donation cannot be deducted as such from your taxable income, alas. But Watermotion will pay income taxes on the donation, so a part of it will return to the collective good!

ABOUT THE IMAGES AND THE CONTENT

The video and photos give an impression of what the research is about. I simplify the story a good deal. The application is the motion and force of water that impacts structures suddenly and violently. This is important for assessing the safety of structures, for example, when waves crash against ships or floodwater hits a building. In the video you see a block of water being released, hitting a wall and rebounding.

It is also important to recall that the images are the results of computer simulations. Running simulations is no easy task, as there are many settings that can produce incorrect results. There are many methods to set up these simulations of water movement, and I focus on just one which is called SPH for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics. These computer simulations can run for hours to weeks and consume a lot of power (approximately 350 to 1300 W). 

With my work, I want to demonstrate that it is possible to extract information from the simulation and intervene early enough when the calculations are not going well. This way, we can save time and energy by working towards a accurate result much earlier. (If you are curious about more, this is a technical explanation!)