NISO Members Form New Working Group to Address Name Changes
Baltimore, MD | April 6, 2021:
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced today that their Voting Members have approved the formation of a new Working Group to develop a Recommended Practice to Update Author Name Changes in the Academic Publication Record after Publication as a Result of Identity Change. NISO invites statements of interest to participate in this Working Group.
Being correctly identified as an author associated with any type of publication output is important for many reasons – accountability, funding, precedence, promotion, tenure, and more. This is true for the outputs themselves, for citations, and for third-party indexing of the publication metadata.
However, author names can change for a number of reasons, including deed poll, divorce, gender transition, marriage, remarriage, and pseudonyms, and the information in their published works needs to be in sync with their actual situation in real life.
This Recommended Practice is intended to ensure the widest possible notification and implementation of changes to author names post-publication, including where changes to author names are requested, or required, not to be made public (for example, transgender name changes where the author does not wish to reveal their change to a wide audience). The Working Group will consult with a wide group of stakeholders involved including, but not limited to, authors, publishers, funders, institutions, indexers, databases, Crossref, ORCID, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and more.
“We are delighted that our Voting Members have approved this new project,” said NISO’s Associate Executive Director, Nettie Lagace. “Correct identification of authors, irrespective of any name changes, is an essential part of the academic record, and we know there is a lot of community support for improving the communications, as well as the process, for ensuring that author names are accurately recorded. We invite participation in the Working Group by interested parties across all our stakeholder communities.”
For more information about the NISO development process for standards and recommended practices, see Creating NISO Standards and, if you’re interested in participating in the Working Group, please contact nlagace@niso.org.
About NISO
Based in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org.
