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By Katie Langin
When Teddy Goetz – a fourth-year medical student at Columbia University – applied for residency programs in October 2020, he felt like he had no choice but to declare himself transgender. “I had to put my birth name all over my application because of my posts, and it was really upsetting,” he says. He changed his legal name to Teddy last year. But many of his papers have listed him using his birth name.
Before submitting his nominations, Goetz had contacted all the journals he had published in – 14 in total – to ask them to change their names. Two journals proposed to change its name and publish a correction notice. Many others did not have a policy for handling author name changes and refused to change their name without one. It was disheartening, but he continued to press the newspapers to meet his demand. Now his name is changed or in the process of being changed on all but one of his posts. “It’s been a very long process and involves a lot of… work, time, energy, attention, huge spreadsheets,” he says. But it’s worth it. “My inheritance should not be the name that is not mine; the inheritance should be mine.
Goetz is part of an informal group of transgender scientists who have called for changes in the science publishing industry to make it more inclusive – not only for trans scientists, but also for others who are changing their names in the middle. career, for example due to a change in marital status or religion. Over the past 6 months, they have seen notable progress: Many scientific publishers – including the American Chemical Society (ACS), Royal Society of Chemistry, PLOS, Wiley, and AAAS – have established policies that allow authors to change their name or first name more easily on published articles. (AAAS is the publisher of Science Careers.) Springer Nature, which publishes more than 2,500 journals, plans to announce a new name change policy “in the near future,” according to an emailed statement to Science Careers.
The new policies allow authors to change their names without public notification of any kind. This marks a break with past practice, which generally did not allow a name change or required a correction notice and co-author’s approval if a change was made. “Previously, there was a dominant attitude that ‘what gets published gets published,’ says Lisa Pecher, associate editor at applied chemistry who worked on Wiley’s name change policy. But it’s important to accommodate authors who change their names, adds Pecher, who is transgender. The policy change “puts power back on who to share this sensitive information with, where it belongs.”
Many journals see their policies as a work in progress and continue to engage in discussions about how to implement the changes. For example, it is not clear how the editors will work together to update the reference lists of previously published articles. “It can’t be something an editor tackles on their own,” says Jessica Rucker, director of global editorial operations at ACS, who is actively working on how to handle citations.
Yet it is clear that “the consensus is changing – the publishing world has taken notice that this is an area in which it has collapsed,” says Theresa Tanenbaum, professor assistant at the University of California at Irvine, who is transgender and worked with the Association for Computing Machinery to update their name change policy in 2019. Tanenbaum says quiet name changes are especially important to scientists trans who can face discrimination, violence and persecution. This is not a frivolous question, she said; it is about “maintaining the livelihoods, security and privacy of a vulnerable population”.
The changes will likely benefit other groups as well, such as people who are struggling with name changes due to marriage and divorce. “I didn’t change my name when I got married, not because I thought I was going to divorce my husband one day,” says Susan Morrissey, director of communications for ACS. “I had already published, so I wanted to keep this record.” With the new name change policies, Morrissey wonders if other people in similar situations might feel more free to make a decision that is right for themselves and their family, rather than one that revolves around their case. publication. “My children’s life would be much easier if I had [changed my last name],” she says.
Even with inclusive name change policies, the change request process on all past publications is still daunting for scientists who are well advanced in their careers. Tanenbaum, for example, published 83 articles that were collectively cited thousands of times before his transition and name change in 2019 – and it was a massive undertaking to fix the record. Some scientists would like to see editors move towards an even bigger change: using a number, such as an ORCID, as an author’s primary numeric identifier rather than a name. That way, authors could change their name in a central location – the ORCID website, for example – and their name would be repopulated wherever it appears in the author lists.
The publishing industry really needs to ask, “What would a complete overhaul look like?” says Irving Rettig, a Ph.D. student at Portland State University who through a Tweeter—Open discussions at ACS to revise their name change policy. He’s happy with the new ACS policy and was the first scientist to use it himself, but Rettig still sees it as a “band-aid” approach. “The problem is that your academic record is tied to a name and the assumption that a name is an immutable object is incorrect.”
“If it was common in our society for men to change their names at the time of marriage, this would have been resolved decades ago,” says Tanenbaum, who is part of a working group on the subject formed by the Committee. of publication ethics. “I think this reflects a publishing system that has been historically mired in patriarchal values that center the experiences of men and not women. … It is high time we did something about this.
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