Beams of particles and papers. How digital preprint archives shape authorship and credit

TL;DR

This paper examines how digital preprint archives like arXiv influence authorship, recognition, and publishing practices among high energy physicists, revealing distinct temporalities and tactics among theorists and experimentalists.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth analysis of how digital repositories shape scholarly practices and author recognition in high energy physics, highlighting community-specific temporal and tactical adaptations.

Findings

Theorists operate on accelerated publication cycles.

Experimentalists develop tactics to navigate large collaborations.

Digital archives influence authorship and recognition practices.

Abstract

In high energy physics, scholarly papers circulate primarily through online preprint archives based on a centralized repository, arXiv, that physicists simply refer to as "the archive". This is not just a tool for preservation and memory, but also a space of flows where written objects are detected and their authors made available for scrutiny. In this work I analyze the reading and publishing practices of two subsets of high energy physicists: theorists and experimentalists. In order to be recognized as legitimate and productive members of their community, they need to abide by the temporalities and authorial practices structured by the archive. Theorists live in a state of accelerated time that shapes their reading and publishing practices around precise cycles. Experimentalists turn to tactics that allow them to circumvent the slowed-down time and invisibility they experience as members of large collaborations. As digital platforms for the exchange of scholarly articles emerge in other fields, high energy physics could help shed light on general transformations of contemporary scholarly communication systems.