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

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'. The archive 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 article, 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.