[hatmatrix]

On the other hand, physics seems to not have this issue. Experimentalists working on topics related to CERN publish jointly (with like 500 co-authors) and theoreticians regularly post pre-prints under review on arXiv. They are a much smaller community though.

[evgen]

This is a consequence of the required resources for the experiments. If it takes a ten billion dollar piece of equipment to produce your results then chances are you are going to be one little cog in a very big machine. There are not papers with 500 co-authors in any other field or even in sub-fields of particle physics that do not require massive accelerators to achieve results.

[inciampati]

There are many large-scale projects in biology that benefit from open collaboration. In general, these require lots of work and produce useful resources used by a whole field. Insights that could revolutionize a field can sometimes be described in a sentence or two, and reproduced in a few days or weeks, so scientists are more uneasy sharing them.