  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.
