Open access publisher Hindawi has announced that authors who change their name after publishing an article with Hindawi will be able to update their name on the article on request, without a correction notice.
Any author name change following publication will be respected on request to the journal or to the Research Integrity team. The article’s meta-data will then be updated without requiring documentation, without posting a corrigendum notice (unless one is asked for), and without informing any other authors. The publisher will also ask indexers to make a silent change.
Growing consensus in scholarly publishing, led by the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Science and Health coalition and a group of transgender, non-binary and gender-non-conforming scholars, that authors should be able to retrospectively change their name on published articles. Partly this is due to the use of previous names being considered hostile, known as deadnaming, and concerns about confusion if someone’s current name does not match their previous name in a publication record. This is also related to respecting authors’ autonomy about how they are known professionally. Until recently most publishers believed that using ORCID to track name changes was sufficient, but prioritizing the version of record over authors’ integrity was a mistake.
Hindawi agrees with this consensus and has previously changed author names in the absence of a formal policy. Joining its parent publisher Wiley, who announced their own policy earlier this year, and informed by the recent guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics (see the working group statement and principles), Hindawi has now updated its publication ethics guidelines.
In a related announcement, Rockefeller University Press Journals - Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), and Journal of General Physiology (JGP) – have announced an editorial policy allowing swift and confidential updates to author names at any time and for any reason including changes to gender identity, marriage, divorce, religion, or other personal circumstances.
Under the policy, authors can contact the editorial offices to request the update to their articles. Changes will be made to any RUP articles authored by the requesting individual and will include HTML, PDF, and associated metadata. Changes will be directly and immediately pushed to Crossref, PubMed, and PMC. Names will also be updated in Rockefeller University Press (RUP) submission, production, and subscription systems as needed. Previous versions of the article are retained on RUP servers for record keeping purposes but will not be publicly accessible. Changes will not be made to citations or reference lists.
