I hesitated to say this, not wanting to encourage lots of people to bug professors, but finding the nearest one working in this area and getting in contact is a good idea. He or she would know if the idea is novel right away, and if it is, could set up an experiment. My daughter is working on behavioral economics in grad school, and the departments all are supposed to help the psych department by making students available for experiments. She has done a lot already, and has the infrastructure set up.
Just ideas can get published in workshops, or published if the inventor of them has a good track record. (I publish almost nothing but them these days.) It would be hard for a new person to do it.
You could try the Open acess publishing route: instead of going through journals, you publish yourself through the next university that offers it on the internet.
LaTeX? Really? All the IEEE journals and conferences I know of take PDF. Some people do write in LaTeX, but lot’s don’t, and our conference template is in Word.
The downside of presenting at a conference or workshop is that it costs money to register, and there are travel and hotel expenses. Someone not in the club might find it offputting. Also, lots of workshops don’t have proceedings, and the reviewing process is sometimes a bit spotty, since the goal is to get new ideas out there for discussion, not to have everything perfect.