Starting from today, any author name change following publication will be respected on request to the journal or to our Research Integrity team. We will update the article’s meta-data without requiring documentation, without posting a corrigendum notice (unless one is asked for), and without informing any other authors. We will also ask indexers to similarly make a silent change.
Why wasn’t this always the policy?
Growing consensus in scholarly publishing, led by the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Science and Health coalition and a group of transgender, nonbinary 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 we have previously changed author names in the absence of a formal policy. Joining our 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) we have now updated our publication ethics guidelines.
We are grateful for the efforts of those who have helped to inform this new policy and we hope that it will better support our authors by advancing a more inclusive publishing industry.
Matt Hodgkinson
Head of Editorial Policy and Ethics, Hindawi
Update, 28 July 2021: Hindawi has joined with other publishers in a partnership with the U.S. National Laboratories to support name change requests, offering an official validation mechanism enabling researchers to ask their respective institutions to pursue name changes on their behalf directly with the publishers and journals.