Mordolff / iStock
By Katie Langin
When Teddy Goetz – a fourth-year medical student at Columbia University – applied for residency programs in October 2020, he felt he had no choice but to postpone himself as a transgender. “I had to put my birth name on my application because of my publications, and it was really upsetting,” he says. He changed his legal name to Teddy last year. But many of his papers listed him by his birth name.
Before Goetz submitted his applications, Goetz contacted every magazine he published – a total of 14 – to ask them to change his name. Two magazines offered to change his name and issue a correction notice. Many others had no policy in dealing with the change of author name and refused to change his name without one. It was discouraging, but he continued to press the magazines to comply with his request. Now his name is being changed or is it changing on all his publications except one. “It was a very long process and involved a lot of … labor, time, energy, attention, massive spreadsheets,” he says. But it’s worth it. ‘My legacy should not be the name that is not mine; the legacy must be mine. ”
Goetz is part of an informal group of transgender scientists who are working for changes in the scientific publishing industry to make it more inclusive – not only for trans scientists, but also for others who change their names in the middle of their careers, for example due to a change in marital status or religion. Over the past six months, they have seen noticeable progress: many scientific publishers – including the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Royal Society of Chemistry, PLOS, Wiley and AAAS – have introduced policies that make it easier for authors to of on published articles. (AAAS is the publisher of Science Careers.) Springer Nature, which publishes more than 2,500 magazines, expects to announce a new name change policy soon, according to a statement in an email to Science Careers.
The new policy allows authors to change their names without any public notice. This is an interruption of previous practices, which in most cases did not allow for a name change, or that a corrective notice and co-author approval was required if a change was made. “Previously, there was a general attitude‘ what has been published is being published ’,” says Lisa Pecher, co-editor at Applied Chemistry who worked on Wiley’s name change policy. But it’s important to accommodate writers who change their names, adds Pecher, who is transgender. The policy shift “places the power over who should share this sensitive information in the hands of the author where it belongs.”
Many magazines view their policies as ongoing work and continue discussions about implementing the changes. For example, it is not clear how publishers will work to update the reference lists of previously published articles. “It can not be something that one publisher will tackle on its own,” said Jessica Rucker, director of global editorial operations at ACS, which is actively handling citations.
Yet it is clear that ‘the consensus is changing – the publishing world has taken note of the fact that this is an area in which they have fallen’, says Theresa Tanenbaum, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, who is transgender and is working with the Association for Computing Machinery to update their name change policy in 2019. Tanenbaum says that discrete name changes are particularly important for trans scientists, which can be subject to discrimination, violence and persecution. This is not a frivolous matter, she says; it is about ‘maintaining the livelihood and security and privacy of a vulnerable population.’
The changes are also likely to benefit other groups, such as people struggling with name changes due to marriage and divorce. “I did not change my name when I got married, not because I thought I was ever going to divorce my husband,” said Susan Morrissey, ACS’s director of communications. “I already published, so I wanted to keep the record.” With the new name change policy, Morrissey wonders if others in similar situations can feel freer to make a decision that is right for themselves and their family – rather than one that revolves around their publication record. ‘My children’s lives would be much easier if I were [changed my last name], “she says.
Even with inclusive name change policies, the process of requesting changes in all previous publications is still daunting for scientists who are far into their careers. Tanenbaum, for example, published 83 articles that were quoted a total of thousands of times before she went over in 2019 and changed her name – and it was a huge undertaking to improve the record. Some scientists want to see publishers move toward an even larger scale change: using a number, such as an ORCID identifier, as the primary digital identifier for an author instead of a name. In this way, authors can change their name in one central place – for example the ORCID website – and their name will be repopulated everywhere if it appears in author lists.
The publishing industry really needs to ask, ‘What would a whole renovation look like?’ says Irving Rettig, a Ph.D. student at Portland State University who – through a tweetDiscussions at ACS begin reviewing their name change policy. He is satisfied with ACS’s new policy and was the first scientist to use it himself, but Rettig still considers it a ‘Band-Aid’ approach. “The problem is that your academic record is linked to a name, and that the assumption that a name is an immutable object is incorrect.”
“If it were common in our society for men to change their names at marriage, it would have been resolved decades ago,” said Tanenbaum, who is part of a working group on the subject formed by the Publications Ethics Committee. ‘I think it reflects a publication system that has historically been trapped in patriarchal values that center men’s experiences and not women’s. … It’s been a long time since we did anything about it. ”