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EDIS is a coalition of organisations working within science and health research committed to improving equality, diversity and inclusion. Our vision is for everyone to have equal opportunities and access to a successful career within science and health, its research and its outcomes. As part of the coalition’s collaboration for change, our members agree on shared objectives and priorities as well as bring challenges to the group for wider insights and to coordinate approaches.

In January one of our member organisations highlighted an issue faced by researchers in relation to publication records. Researchers who had transitioned to their true gender identity and legally changed their name had no clear, simple or standardised way of changing the name used on previous publications to match their updated identity. This could cause issues in having their publication record correctly attributed to them but also in having to ‘out’ themselves as trans whenever these publications needed listing e.g. on a CV or grant proposal.

“A number of countries now have legislation which protect trans people like myself from being outed without permission. Whilst name at the time of publication is information that I once volunteered to the publishers, inability for this information to be updated in the context of gender transition, has always represented a breach of my privacy.” – [anon, biophysicist]

Researchers we spoke to also mentioned the disconnect with their deadname and their body of work published under it, the emotional reaction seeing their deadname can cause, and also being forced into having conversations about their gender identity and transition to explain the differences when they didn’t want to. The difference in name is also more noticeable for researchers from countries that have gendered surnames, giving no space to have these conversations at the researchers’ own pace and on their terms.

“As a researcher coming from country where surnames are gendered, in addition to first name change after transition I also had to adjust the end of my last name … this drastic change readily caught attention at the time when I was going through name change procedure, which was during my PhD.”

“I would like to associate my papers published under the “deadname”, but I would like it to pass with as much stealth as possible … It would be important for me to have these papers on my record, as they set back my publishing record by 5 years … However, most of the time, avoiding the risk to be outed I do not use them in my CV. Fearing the public disclosure I did not contact the journal, nor did I connect my ORCID IDs yet.” [anon, microbiologist]

We asked our members to reach out to their associated publishing arms or publishers they had close relationships with to start the conversation and find out 1) whether there were any standard ways of dealing with a name change request and 2) whether they were designed in a way to support the needs of a researcher who has changed their name as part of their gender transition. Wellcome Open Research and F1000 were first to respond positively to creating an internal policy with us and working with trans researchers to review the policy and process to make sure it fits their needs. – Lilian Hunt, EDIS

F1000 is committed to listening to researchers and responding to their needs to create a better publishing experience. That’s why implementing our new policy to allow researchers to change their names – for example due to marriage, divorce or gender identity recognition – on published articles and other assets is imperative to enable inclusivity and aid authors in gaining credit for their work.

We are indebted to EDIS for starting the discussions with Wellcome Open Research, one of our white-label publishing platforms, which has led to F1000 implementing this new name change policy across all eight of our publishing platforms. The workflow for the policy has also been assessed and validated by researchers, facilitated by EDIS, who have themselves been (or are) in the complicated process of changing their names on publications. Their feedback has been invaluable in creating a simple, fair and unobtrusive workflow for researchers.

There are two stages to the workflow: identification check and implementation. In the first stage, a researcher requests a name change through the editorial office. To protect researchers, we require that some form of identification is provided for us to ensure that the researcher is requesting a name change for themselves – this may be an email from an email address we have stored on the F1000Research system or a letter from a supervisor. We understand that some name changes are sensitive and may be difficult to provide identification. To reduce distress, we are willing to work with researchers to enable them to provide identification on their own terms.

Any change of name will not require a new version of the article to be created; all existing versions will be edited to reflect the change, and the DOI will remain the same. A Notice of Change will be posted for transparency, which will not identify whose name was changed in order to safeguard the person involved. Our Production team will be responsible for resending files to indexers, e.g. PubMed, however we unfortunately cannot guarantee the timeline for indexers to implement the change.

Currently, very few publishers or journals have name change policies in place, and many guiding committees do not have formal recommendations to follow. As we continue to move from print publications to digital formats, the barriers to correcting the academic record are reduced, and therefore, we encourage other publishers to work with organisations, such as EDIS, to implement policies allowing name changes on publications, in order to allow research to be inclusive for all. Fair and accessible publishing is very important at F1000 – if you have further suggestions for policies or improvements, which are a barrier to this, please don’t hesitate to contact us, we would be happy to hear from you.

“I had not dared hope this would be even discussed, and had resigned myself to my old papers all being in my deadname. But hearing it may be possible to change this, I realize I would regain pride in some of those papers that I now feel distant toward.” – [Sofia Kirke Forslund, MDC Berlin / @inanna_nalytica]