This is a website for notes and ideas describing the sociology and history of preprint culture – the distribution of unpublished and unrefereed paper manuscripts that started in physics and has today expanded to many disciplines. Particular focus is given to the role of actors usually considered peripheral to scientific communication, such as librarians or moderators on preprints servers, in sustaining the preprint communication infrastructure in diverse ways: through selection practices, categorization systems, and information tools. The purpose of this website and blog is to document findings of research into how these people and their work contribute to an own communication system capable of constructing academic value and legitimacy, and to present these insights to a wider audience.

The website maintained and (irregularly) updated by Phillip H. Roth, a science studies scholar and media sociologist, currently based at the Käte Hamburger Center: Cultures of Research, RWTH Aachen University, Germany. My first book traced the conceptual and institutional genealogy of biomedical disciplinarity from nineteenth-century Germany to the postwar United States using a conceptual history approach. In current research, I examine how scholarly communication systems and research cultures are structurally and culturally interrelated, focusing especially on the case of the pre-Web preprint communication infrastructure in physics.

I’m a native of Cologne, a German and US citizen, and spent part of my childhood in Ft. Worth, Texas. As a teen, I moved to the beautiful city of Dresden in former East Germany, where I completed my high school education and graduated from the TU Dresden with an MA in Political Science and History. I received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Bonn. After appointments at the University of Duisburg-Essen, the University of Bonn, and a fellowship at the at the Kolleg Friedrich Nietzsche in Weimar, I’m currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher at the Käte Hamburger Center: Culture of Research (c:o/re), RWTH Aachen University, Germany. I live in Aachen with my wife and two daughters.