This blog post was written by Sandra Maglanque, SFU Library co-op student.

From citations to collaboration to tenure and to promotion, a researcher’s publication history is a key part to their success as a scholar. However, scholars run into a number of issues when they need to retroactively change their names on any publication that they have authored for any reason. In recent years, more awareness has been raised for the struggles and concerns that scholars face over this issue. Trans authors like Theresa Jean Tanenbaum and supporters have been pushing for more inclusive policies involving author-requested name-changes for scholarly publications.

Current challenges

Authors seeking to change their names in their publications often face a long and difficult process as they negotiate with publishers to get their name corrected. Publishers also tend to ask if an author has legal proof of their name-change, which is often not easily accessible for trans people due to a number of social, political and legal reasons.

Overall, this creates barriers for trans scholars (or any other scholar who is seeking to change their name!) in the academic field since they end up with the choices of:

1. going through a long, bureaucratic process as they repeatedly negotiate with various publishers to have their correct name and identity associated with all their scholarly work
2. the continued use of their pre-transition or pre-name change identity or;
3. abandoning their previous scholarly work to publish under their correct identity, negatively affecting both the trans author’s academic career and the academic community

Call to action

In 2021, a document was published by the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE) that describes a set of principles and best practices that publishers should consider and aim to implement in name-change policies. All principles and practices described aimed to best facilitate name-change requests in an inclusive and equitable way for trans authors.

Since then more awareness has been raised for the unique difficulties that trans authors face. Some publishers such as Springer Nature have developed a trans-inclusive name-change policy to allow trans authors to retroactively correct their names for Springer Nature’s publications.

For those interested in learning more, a news article published by Amy DePaul gives an excellent overview of actions taken to support inclusive trans author name change policies. DePaul goes over the activities of scholars and publishers to reach a more inclusive name-change policy for scholars, COPE’s statement of principles for name-change policies, and things that can complicate the process such as PDFs.

ORCID

ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is another option to help authors maintain consistency across their publications, regardless of name changes. ORCID gives scholars a unique, persistent numeric identifier for free. The unique identifier automatically links the scholar’s publications and creates a digital record of their work. Authors who have changed their name or share their name with other researchers can be uniquely identified using their ORCID ID on publications. For more information about ORCID, take a look at the Library’s guide to ORCID!

Conclusion

Names are incredibly important as part of our identities and in academic scholarship. Having the correct name across all publications for a scholar allows for consistent citations and an unbroken publication history. Initiatives and changes such as these are essential to make academic scholarship fair and inclusive for all scholars.

References

DePaul, A. (2021, July 21). Scientific publishers expedite name changes for authors. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02014-7

Tanenbaum, T. J. (2020). Publishers: Let transgender scholars correct their names. Nature, 583(7817), 493–493. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02145-3

Tanenbaum, T. J., Rettig, I., Schwartz, H. M., Watson, B. M., Goetz, T. G., Spiel, K., & Hill, M. (2021). A vision for a more trans-inclusive publishing world: guest article. Committee of Publication Ethics. https://publicationethics.org/news/vision-more-trans-inclusive-publishing-world