New Policy Aims to Help Transgender Researchers Update Former Names


Published articles are an important part of a researcher’s resume. However, for those who change their names during some part of their career, the disconnect between the old name and the new name can cause serious problems.

This is a hurdle, especially for trans scientists; It’s a stumbling block for trans scientists, many of whom say that publishers’ names not updating their past work is not only wrong but also hurtful and discriminatory.

On Wednesday, a group of labs and major scientific publishers announced an agreement that essentially aims to simplify the process of applying new names to old papers by shifting most of the administrative labor from the researcher to the lab.

“This change, emotionally and administratively, removes the enormous burden on researchers to fix the record,” said Lady Idos, head of diversity, equity and inclusion at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who spearheaded the deal. Declaration.

The deal is not limited to trans writers; it’s meant to make the process easier for anyone who wants the legacy to reflect a changed name.

In addition to 17 national laboratory networks conducting research in various scientific fields, agreements were signed with 13 publications such as the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, arXiv, Royal Society of Chemistry, Springer Nature and Wiley.

“As a trans scientist, having publications under my birth name causes me to have mixed feelings about past work that I would have been proud of otherwise,” said Amalie Trewartha, a scientist at the Toyota Research Institute and a research fellow at the Berkeley Lab. expression. “I am faced with the dilemma of either hiding some parts of myself or revealing myself. It would be extremely meaningful to have my name updated in my previous posts.”

While many journals have independently updated their policies in recent years, the agreement announced Wednesday aims to streamline the collaborative process so that research authors can forward name change requests to the labs where they work and then work with journals. to handle the change.

Theresa Jean Tanenbaum, associate professor IT department Irvine of the University of California welcomed the news.

His job – works on interactive storytelling, play and identity — Published in several magazines before changing its name in 2019. Dr. Tanenbaum said that forcing each publisher to update their records accordingly was a long and painful process. Some the objections faced it stemmed from editors’ reluctance to “rewrite history” or fears that name changes could open the door to fraud.

He used read Name Change Policy Working Group Hoping to make the name change process easier for others.

“Many trans people find the previous name harmful,” she said. “And the act of revealing a trans person’s previous name is often used to attack us.”

Having a different name in past jobs can also lead to unwanted disclosures by making a person’s trans identity visible to readers, colleagues and potential employers. It can also expose people to danger, as researchers do public jobs that may involve sharing contact information, such as a lecturer whose email is shared on a university’s website, or even sharing their physical location.

There are also pragmatic problems: If two different names are added to a person’s academic work, this can complicate data on the author’s readership or citations, or make it difficult for readers to access all of a researcher’s work in one place.

Dr. “It makes it much more difficult to claim credit for the scholarship you do,” Tanenbaum said.

Joerg Heber, Berkeley Lab’s head of research integrity, said he ran into the name change problem while working as editor-in-chief at the Public Library of Science. “I used to get requests from transgender researchers about the possibility of changing their names as it appears in published research papers,” she said.

This process can be particularly daunting for researchers who have published their work in various media. “If you’ve been doing research for a long time,” said Dr. Heber said, “You have written so many articles.”

For publishers, the fix may involve technical work such as updating metadata or search indexes. Pronouns, biographies or photos may also need to be updated.

Dr. “It may take a long time for publishers to recreate this published article,” Heber said. “It’s not like just changing something on a website.”

But Judy Verses, vice president at Wiley, a major New Jersey-based publisher, said on Wednesday that publishers play an important role in “the entire information ecosystem.”

“This partnership demonstrates the power of scientific collaboration – not only to move the world forward with new discoveries, but also to advance inclusiveness with impact,” he added.

Tanenbaum added that he is interested in seeing how the deal will turn out, adding that labs should be diligent in respecting the agency of authors when interacting with publishers on behalf of publishers, and that publishers should be thorough about the technical aspects of publishers. name changes, which may include searching legacy databases, rethinking their reliance on the PDF format, or working with external vendors who process their data.

“We’ve seen a huge increase in adoption of name change policies,” he said. “Now we see exactly how much work this requires and just how inflexible our platforms are.”



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