On Wednesday, October 4, the Virtual Fall PAM Partner Panel Discussion was held, discussing Author Name Change Policies.
Moderated by Zach Lannes, Resident Science Librarian at the University of Michigan and Nicola Poser, Director of Marketing and Sales at the American Mathematical Society, the session included comments from panelists Juliette Bruce, Mathematics post-doc at Brown University and inaugural president of SPECTRA, the association of LGBTQ+ mathematicans; Ginny Herbert, Associate Publisher at AIP Publishing; and Kivmars Bowling, Publications Director at SIAM.
In January of 2021, several members of SPECTRA participated in a cross-disciplinary working group for inclusivity, and one result of this work was a guest article, “A vision for a more trans-inclusive publishing world” on the website of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which provides guidelines on ethical best-practices to scholarly publishers. This article outlined 5 guiding principles regarding author name changes:
- Accessibility: Name changes should be available to authors upon request and without legal documentation, unnecessary barriers, burdens, or labor placed upon the author making the request
- Comprehensiveness: Name changes should remove all instances of an author’s previous name from the records maintained and disseminated by the publishers
- Invisibility: Name changes should not draw attention to the gender identity of an author, nor create a clear juxtaposition between the current name and the previous name
- Expediency and simplicity: Name changes should be implemented in a timely manner, and with a minimum of bureaucratic overhead
- Recurrence and maintenance: Publishers should regularly audit and correct new instances of changed names in order to prevent ongoing dissemination of incorrect information
Juliette spoke a bit about the working group and the development of these guidelines, which led to a discussion about the experience of publishers working to devise and implement policies, spurred by the guest article.
Ginny Herbert reviewed the efforts at AIP to contextualize the guidance with real experiences of AIP authors, noting that in the past, policies have often been adopted without taking that step and the result can be some unnecessary push-back or misunderstanding on behalf of stakeholders. By making the effort to contextualize, approval was quite straight-forward and the organization was very much on board. Nicola Poser noted that as a publisher embedded within a scholarly society, there are several layers for policy approval beyond the publishing organization and the process can be quite slow, but the adoption of the name-change policy actually moved smoothly and quite quickly, with the relevant committees agreeing to review it over email rather than waiting until the next annual meeting. From the audience, Patrick Franzen, Director of Publications and Platform at SPIE, discussed the efforts to broaden the name change policy beyond the publication record, but to make sure that the changes also flow through to membership, conference attendance and other society touchpoints, so the effort and the impact is society-wide.
Juliette Bruce and Ginny Herbert discussed the benefits of the collaborative effort between researchers and publishers in drafting the policy. Ginny noted that implementing changes in publishing platform can be quite complex, and Juliette noted that academics are not typically aware of these complexities, pointing out that “actually understanding how difficult some of these challenges are and where the pain points are is something that is really hard to see, from both sides. . . from two distinct fields coming together to create something.” Kivmars Bowling acknowledged the value of the National Labs name change program as a model as a workflow for initiating name changes, and noted that in general, implementation has been relatively smooth so far.
In response to an audience question about knowledge sharing among publishers, Kivmars pointed to the Joint commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishing, first launched by the Royal Society of Chemistry and now with over 40 participating publishers. Among other activities, the working group of the Joint commitment maintains, collates and shares polices among publishers. COPE, mentioned earlier, is also an important source for best practices and standards for publishers.
Zach Lannes posed a question about how publisher action on author name changes fits into a larger focus on equity and DEIA considerations, which led to further discussion around the goals of the Joint commitment. Founded in summer of 2020, the signatory group has committed to:
- Understand our research community: enabling diversity data to be self-reported by members in our community to allow for analysis of anonymized diversity data to understand where action is needed
- Reflect the diversity of our community: Use anonymized data to uncover subject-specific diversity baselines and set minimum targets to achieve appropriate and inclusive representation of our authors, reviewers, and editorial decision-makers
- Share success to achieve impact: Transparently share resources, policies, measurements, language and standards, to move inclusion and diversity in publishing forward together
- Set minimum standards on which to build: We believe these minimum standards enable publishers, editorial decision-makers, authors, and reviewers to identify and take achievable, specific actions to improve inclusion and diversity in scholarly publishing
The group also discussed the role of vendors and permanent identifiers (including ORCID), and Lance Utley pointed out that libraries and other institutions that don’t think of themselves as publishers often have a substantial history of internal documentation, memos, reports, etc., much of which may be accessed by the wider public, in which these considerations could be useful, as well.
All the panelists agreed that the most important element to innovative initiatives is that they lead to meaningful change and not just creating check-boxes or a statement on a website, particularly when dealing with what can be sensitive personal data – it not only needs to maintained in a secure, private, and anonymized way, but it needs be clear why it is being gathered and how it will be used to create interventions, and how success will be measured.
A few additional resources can be found from the Name Change Policy Working Group.
Thanks again to our panelists and to everyone who participated! The full recording is available for viewing.
PAM Bulletin 