The American Physical Society (APS) has released the details of its name-change policy for the Physical Review journals. The policy is intended to make the world’s leading physics journals more inclusive and ensure authors retain ownership of prior work published under a different name.
The announcement comes as the global scientific community prepares to explore the role of identity in scholarly communication as part of Peer Review Week, September 20–24, 2021.
In its 2016 report on the LGBT Climate in Physics, the APS Ad-Hoc Committee on LGBT Issues urged APS to systematically address name changes in its journals “so that transgender physicists who change their names will have their full publication records visible and, at the same time, will not be outed by their publication record.” Accordingly, the name-change policy allows authors to change their names on published papers without an accompanying correction.
While the policy is designed to address the needs of transgender researchers in particular, authors may change their names for any reason (for example, a change in marital status) on papers published in any Physical Review journal since 2000.
APS is working in partnership with the 17 US national laboratories to facilitate name changes on behalf of their scientists.
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