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

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 sloweddown 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.

Astrophysicists and physicists as creators of ArXiv-based commenting resources for their research communities. An initial survey

“…This seems to have happened rather early in some cases and anyway independently from ArXiv's adoption of a web 2.0 setting. In this respect, the vision of ArXiv as a founding ground for physicists' accreditation within their community results to be appropriate, not so much as the elegant proposal of a database having a legitimizing role for itself among physics researchers [13], but rather as an actual catalyst for web 2.0 scholarly exchanges within astrophysics and physics.…”

“…Also, it has been maintained that "astrophysicists have limited engagement with Web 2.0 technologies", while the role of "email networks" for communication has been stressed, in an overall setting where "face-to-face interaction remains an essential part of the collaborative process" [25]. This has later been confirmed by [13,33] (the former in a specific context, the latter for high energy physicists).…”

Designing for Reproducibility

“…Despite competition between LHC collaborations, openness in scholarly communication is characteristic in HEP. The preprint server culture enables scientists to share ideas and results freely and immediately [23,32]. In her ethnographic study, Velden [56] illustrates the openness that characterizes scholarly communication in HEP.…”

Preprint for the Humanities - Fiction or a real possibility?

“…community originated in the field of physics, more precisely in the subfield of high energy physics (HEP). In high energy physics papers are generally submitted to an academic journal only after the phase of intense academic debate is concluded Delfanti (2016). Formal publication is actually not very interesting to the active scholars in the field, and mainly serves a filing function and credit gathering function.…”

“…It is operated by a limited number of people and funded entirely through grants. It contains 99% of all written research output in HEP Delfanti (2016). At its conception it was merely an email based reflection of an existing practice amongst practitioners of HEP.…”