Preprint Culture is a book project that employs media studies and book history to examine how science came to speak and traffic in preprints. The goal is to deliver a compelling media history that can help make sense of the current status of preprints in science as well as shed light on how processes of digitization have impacted scientific communication, both culturally and socially. Preprints are scientific texts, often intended for formal publication in a peer-reviewed journal, which are circulated to colleagues beforehand as preliminary versions. While preprints originated in physics after World War II, with the informal practice of privately forwarding paper drafts to other researchers via mail, distribution of preprints has become very much formalized today through the cataloging of preprints in large online databases and the use of public servers like arXiv.org. During the recent Covid crisis, preprints gained widespread publicity when scientists and physicians rapidly disseminated research results worldwide, even before peer-review, to help orient clinical action as well as public health decisions.

The basic idea of Preprint Culture is to understand preprints as media technologies, whose recording, storing, and transmitting capabilities have immense cultural significance. Just in the way files have been studied as media technologies, for instance, I want to understand preprints as acting like (imperfect) “recording devices”, which register things that happen in research “in the medium of writing”.¹ Since a defining feature of preprints is their rapid circulation to a discrete community or research culture, however, rather than dissemination to the general academic public, the project views preprints in analogy to “information genres”.² This means bringing them into proximity of the wide range of documents, such as memos, reports, letters, or forms, that exist to relay information through the organizational structures of modern work environments.³ My thesis is that preprints reveal a complex relationship of genre and format in scholarly texts that helps elucidate their uncertainty as either prepublication drafts and manuscripts on the one hand or formal publications on the other.

Preprint Culture then traces the history of preprints from the postwar era to the present as an exercise in what in media studies is called “format theory”.⁴ This implies studying the development of different regimes responsible for handling and circulating preprints in various formats – from typescripts and photocopies sent by mail through TeX and PostScript files distributed via email to PDFs stored on online repositories – and asking what they reveal about the complex material conditions that enabled managing and processing information in late-modern science. Preprint Culture sets out to tell the history of preprints as an investigation of the technologies, concepts, protocols, and underlying infrastructures that enabled the material encoding of data for the purpose of rapid transmission and for storing scientific information. One aim of the project is to reveal how seemingly mundane practices like typing, photocopying, mailing, filing, and cataloging – and the people behind them – evolved into becoming the infrastructures and technologies used for handling preprints. Form this perspective, librarians – and often women – have contributed significantly to the formation of science’s preprint culture.⁵

Analytically, Preprint Culture looks for what can be called “bibliographic imaginaries”.⁶ By these I want to understand the ideas about how preprints belong into the bibliographic universe of scientific information and the perceptions of how they related to other forms and genres of communication. Imaginaries of information management and of scholarly media, such as the scientific journal, the encyclopedia, or the database, have been driven by themes such as “information overload”, “techno-utopianisms” for handling scholarly information, or “access fantasies” to the body of scientific literature.⁷ Preprint imaginaries thus offer important insights into how actors and institutions imagined their use or function as a medium, how they could support (or harm) science, and which technologies and practices could help establish and control such a system of scientific communication.

Historically, Preprint Culture focuses on two important centers for research in high-energy physics – the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, which contributed greatly to turning circulating paper drafts into serious bibliographic formats. The aim is to highlight their libraries as places that developed various regimes for recording, ordering, and sharing preprints and also pioneered the digitization of the preprint system. CERN was the institution to first subject the initially informal means of scientific communication via preprints to a bibliographic regime in the late 1950s. Later, moreover, the center was also the institution at which, in 1989, the World Wide Web was invented and released to the world, making possible today’s preprint websites. SLAC, in turn, made informing the physics community about preprints a regular event after its founding in 1962. The center’s library collected and cataloged new high-energy physics preprints and published the listings via their newsletter “Preprints in Particles and Fields” to participating physics research institutes around the globe. It was also here that huge strides were made toward digitizing the preprint catalog with the introduction of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES-HEP) in 1974.

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1. Cf. Cornelia Vismann (2008). Files. Law and Media Technology. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Stanford: Stanford University Press.  ↩︎
2. Cf. Lisa Gitelman (2014). Paper Knowledge. Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham/London: Duke University Press; John Guillory (2004). The Memo and Modernity. Critical Inquiry 31(1). 108–132. ↩︎
3. JoAnn Yates (1989). Control Through Communication. The Rise of System in American Management. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ↩︎
4. Jonathan Sterne (2012). MP3. The Meaning of a Format. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Cf. Dennis Tenen (2017). Plain Text. The Poetics of Computation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
   Formats define the operational rules for technology to process data, determine the affordances of a medium, and control and delimit access to “content”. Formats depend on a range of factors, such as media, infrastructures, protocols, codes, standards, and software. The same text not only depends on different technical and social conditions of reception with change of format; it is thereby also afforded different functions and meanings within different cultural settings. ↩︎
5. Two pivotal librarians in this context were Luisella Goldschmidt-Clermont at CERN and Louise Addis at SLAC. ↩︎
6. Cf. Andrew Piper (2009). Dreaming in Books. The Making of Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. ↩︎
7. Cf. Ann M. Blair (2010). Too Much to Know. Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven/London: Yale University Press; Geoffrey C. Bowker (2005). Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press; Alex Csiszar (2018). The Scientific Journal. Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press; Chad Wellmon (2015). Organizing Enlightenment. Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ↩︎