The way it works is that one is a member of a collaboration. That collaboration publishes a paper, with 200 people on the author's list - technically, all the member of the collab. have been working at the experiment at some point. Of course, if an academic is a member of three or four of these collaborations, and each collab. publishes 10-20 papers a year, there's no way for the academic to fully understand the papers and do anything else on top of that...