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Perhaps this question is slightly out of scope for this page, but I still ask here.

Can you work for a university/academic institution as a researcher or as a teacher, with the status of a freelancer? In case this helps, I'm based in France and have applied for a freelance status (called auto-entrepreneur/micro entrepreneur in the French administrative terms), and even though I'm searching for regular temporary/permanent position in France, this hasn't seen any success yet, so I want to use that freelance status to do research at a high level (at least postdoctoral) as I strongly feel I'm genuinely passionate by fundamental research, so I've to find a way to do so, even if I may or may not be good enough to secure a formal position.

Just in case this helps: my subject(s) will be ideally the intersection between differential geometry and statistics/statistical machine learning, manifold learning, but open to other topics, e.g. applied differential geometry, or just statistical learning etc.

From my having spent long time in academia, I've never seen this happening, because normally the academic contracts are either regular CDD or CDI's. But I wonder if the above possibilities still exist in France or abroad?

EDIT: Some people asked me about my motivation for the same. It is my continued interest to do research and publish, but also to earn some money on the side by consulting or freelance jobs etc. IN fact once you're a freelance, you can hire other freelance to do your freelance projects not related to academia/research, so essentially some income without working, where I work on academic research projects myself. This is the reason I want my postdoc related contract to be a freelance once, where I can be employed as a consultant for a project.

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    "Freelancer" and employee are kind of opposites. How do you expect to be paid.
    – Buffy
    Mar 8, 2021 at 14:01
  • @Buffy Thanks for your comment. By 'freelance', I meant I'd charge for the number of hours I worked in a project, and not by a regular monthly amount of x€/month. So I'm imagining something like securing a project in say machine learning, with a faculty member who's a certain grant to hire researchers, but in place of hiring regular researchers, he can hire someone who'll bill him/the lab/department a certain amount that's a function of hours (s)he worked for that project. I don't see why that's not possible?
    – Science Man
    Mar 8, 2021 at 14:48
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    Seems unlikely anywhere, anytime. I think you need a different plan.
    – Buffy
    Mar 8, 2021 at 15:24
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    "So I'm imagining something like securing a project in say machine learning, with a faculty member who's a certain grant to hire researchers, but in place of hiring regular researchers, he can hire someone who'll bill him/the lab/department a certain amount that's a function of hours (s)he worked for that project." If the faculty member has a grant to hire researchers, why don't you apply to be one of the researchers they hire? Also I imagine you would already run into trouble with the grant agency disallowing the freelance aspect. Have you tried applying for grants yourself (national and eu)?
    – Rammus
    Mar 9, 2021 at 13:01
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    I find this question very relevant. In the end post-docs are treated somewhat like freelancers that work on a project for a certain amount of time. It should be possible to hire freelancers but unfortunately funding agencies have limitations that only allow certain contracts to pay people involved in the project. Post-docs in Europe should have a union.
    – Herman Toothrot
    Dec 20, 2021 at 17:57

2 Answers 2

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For most funding agencies, the organisation that applied for the funding is expected to conduct the funded work. Outsourcing the work to a different organization, such as Freelance Science Man, without the permission of the funding agency might be grant fraud.

To get freelance research work that is funded by a funding agency, you would have to either:

  • Convince the university to convince the funding agency to approve the freelance contract. This is unlikely to work; if allowed, it's probably too much paperwork.
  • Apply to the funding agency for funds directly, possibly with a university partner. This does not strictly answer your question, and you probably will not want to do it because of the complex paperwork and risk involved.

Overall, I do not understand why you would want to freelance and postdoc at the same time, but if you really must do this, I suggest you get an ordinary postdoc job and hire a lawyer to figure out how to make your freelance business legal.

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    Note that freelance contractors and hourly employees are not the same thing under some legal systems.
    – Anonymous Physicist
    Jul 9, 2021 at 19:43
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    If your expertise was in higher education management consulting, you might have better luck because the funding could come from teaching, and not a research funding agency.
    – Anonymous Physicist
    Jul 9, 2021 at 19:45
  • Hello and thank you for your answer - upvoted! Now to your question: "Overall, I do not understand why you would want to freelance and postdoc at the same time", the short answer is that I need money (considering my age, previous work history and other factors irrelevant here) and a plan that'd allow me to be a freelance on top of that postdoc. And I'm already a declared freelance here in France with paperwork to prove it, and so I simply don't want to let that source of income go once I receive a postdoc offer.
    – Science Man
    Jul 11, 2021 at 21:23
  • If your main goal is to get money, being a postdoc is not the most efficient way to do it.
    – Anonymous Physicist
    Jul 14, 2021 at 6:56
  • I did never say that it was my main goal, perhaps I conveyed myself incorrectly. My backstory is that: I switched to industry after a few postdocs, and that didn't turn out to be a success, nor they were places I belonged to. This made me realize two things: i) I belong to academia (80% of the professors/CNRS researchers I talked to said my CV was outstanding for a postdoc position, and only later I understood that my true place is academic research), and ii) during my years of failure in industry, I lost money, I've to make up for that. Freelance work and subcontracting may help with this.
    – Science Man
    Jul 15, 2021 at 12:59
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Definitively, it's possible in Spain, at least in some cases - I've done it twice.

In two projects I participated, the rules allowed for contracting external services. At least one of them was privately funded, so basically the funding entity (and the letter of the contracts) was mostly concerned with getting useful results. For several reasons, it was more convenient to hire a researcher as a contractor than as an employee.

I did that at a predoctoral level, but I've seen a similar case with a doctor.

In case anybody wonders, at least in one case the convenience reasons were more about my convenience than about those of the sponsor, the PI or the university.

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    The OP ended asking "in France or abroad". I tried a partial answer to the "abroad" part.
    – Pere
    Jul 10, 2021 at 18:32
  • Hi thanks a lot - it's a partial relief and I'm glad to know that the possibility exists in Spain, I'm sure there should be something similar in France as well. What area did your do your postdoc in question in?
    – Science Man
    Jul 11, 2021 at 21:18
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    Not postdoc but sort of predoc - although I think it didn't matter a lot. I did it in biology and ecology, but I think it depends more on specific project conditions than on area.
    – Pere
    Jul 12, 2021 at 9:55
  • While the answer to "is it possible" may be "yes", I think the likelihood of finding such an arrangement is vanishingly small. Don't arrange your career so as to depend on such unusual opportunities.
    – Buffy
    Jul 15, 2021 at 14:22

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