Luisella and the Physicists: hegemonic cultures and new disciplines

Abstract

Luisella Goldschmidt-Clermont (1925-2013) is known for her article – Communication Patterns in High-Energy Physics (1965) – focused on the practice and circulation of preprint papers among the physicists’ community. The article was never published by the scientific journal to which it had been submitted, thus remaining a preprint itself – an emblematic rather than significant coincidence. It was almost doomed to oblivion until its online publication in 2002, when it was acknowledged as a groundbreaking study of what, a few decades later, was going to become the highly sophisticated open access scholarly communication system.
Cultural and gender studies now help us to better understand this “preprint on preprint” taking into consideration Luisella’s life as a whole (a librarian, a scholar, a wife, a woman), thus revealing her author status: an author claiming for equality. Luisella’s “anthropological” observation of the Physicists’ community from the supposedly subordinate point of view of the library service, discloses once again the eternal dispute between genders and between two cultures.