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 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.

💡 Analysis

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.

📄 Content

Beams of particles and papers How digital preprint archives shape authorship and credit Alessandro Delfanti University of Toronto, Canada 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. In   high   energy   physics   (HEP),   the   spheres   in   which   information   circulates   and   credit   is attributed are partially separated from the ones formally used to evaluate research output. Scholarly papers circulate primarily in venues outside the traditional peer­reviewed scholarly journals. The community exchanges, retrieves, and evaluates papers almost exclusively through online preprint or ‘e­print’ archives that publish research manuscripts that have not yet been subject to a formal peer review and editorial process. These services are based on a centralized open access repository, arXiv.org, that physicists simply refer to as ‘the archive’, and other websites that use its data to provide more complex information about authors or citations and are collectively referred to as ‘archives’. In sum, most HEP physicists do not read journals in their field but rather access written content through arXiv or other repositories that capture the articles deposited on it. Furthermore, epistolary and face­to­face communication are key in processes  of  information exchange  and individual   evaluation.   However,   HEP  physicists  do publish their work in journals and spend considerable money and effort in sustaining them. This separation between what is read and formal peer­reviewed publications makes HEP an ideal case for investigating the relation between the scholarly communication system and the dynamics of scientific credit and attribution. HEP’s reading and publishing practices diverge even   from   those   of   other   subfields   within   physics.   Yet   studying   its   archive   could   help understand more general transformations of contemporary scholarly communication systems. HEP physicists need to master the functioning of their archives in order to be claim credit for what they have done and signal their presence as productive and legitimate members of their communities. Negotiations about what constitutes a publication, who is an author, and which temporalities are to be met on arXiv point to problems that are increasingly common for other scholarly fields. In the past few years, platforms for the publication of scholarly articles beyond or collaterally to peer­reviewed journals have proliferated, taking a variety of forms. They are now available in many sectors of research and attract millions of researchers. Some are public, some are private, others are relatively low­tech, whereas others have adopted technologies that are typical of the most recent social media. Created in 2013 and explicitly inspired by the physics repository, biorXiv.org provides a self­publishing platform for the life sciences. In fields in the social sciences   and   humanities,   commercial   services   such   as   academia.edu   have   been   able   to supersede institutional and public archives and have attracted increasing volumes of preprints. In 2016, the for profit academic publisher Elsevier has entered the field by purchasing SSRN, a repository that is increasingly popular with law and economics scholars.   Disciplines   in  which researchers   have   been   using  open   archives   for   decades   as   the   main infrastructures to exchange their own papers – such as high energy physics – show that these instruments are connected to specific ways of circulating scientific writing and structuring the scientific community. Preprint archives are closely connected to the existence of what has been called a ‘preprint culture’, developed and settled since the early 1960s (Bohlin, 2004; Mele et al., 2006). Disciplines either not having developed this culture or having epistemic, instituti

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