As part of our commitment to addressing the needs of all research communities to improve inclusivity, diversity, and equity and inclusion, the Code4Lib Journal Editorial Committee (referred to hereafter as the “Editorial Committee”) has implemented a policy to enable name and pronoun changes for our authors.[1] Going forward, all requests to make a name or pronoun change will be honored. This includes, but is not limited to, name changes because of marriage, divorce, gender affirmation, and religious conversion. The Code4Lib Journal will not publish a correction notice nor require any form of proof or supporting documentation.

All references to the author within the Code4Lib Journal will be fully replaced online, and their indexing metadata (which affects how the author list appears in other outlets (Director of Open Access Journals, Google Scholar, etc.) will be updated accordingly. This replaces the author’s name fully while ensuring that citation information such as the DOI for the paper remains the same. All previous citations to the paper remain valid.

In order to enable co-authors to update the way they cite the paper in the future, we recommend informing them of the name change to the article. The Editorial Committee will ask authors who are updating their name to select one of three options: (1) the Editorial Committee will contact the co-authors on the author’s behalf; (2) the author may prefer to contact the co-authors themselves;or (3) authors may opt not to inform them at all.

To request a name and/or pronoun change, please email journal@code4lib.org with your request, links to the articles in question, and confirmation as to whether or not you permit the Editorial Committee to contact the co-authors to inform them of the change. The author will be sent a draft with the changes and asked to review and approve it before publication. We are committed to implementing the updates promptly and confidentially in recognition of the potentially sensitive nature of these requests.

Please note that misspellings or other errors in an author’s name in published papers will be managed following Code4Lib’s usual post-publication corrections policy. Outdated affiliations or changes to email addresses that are not due to changes to the author’s name will not be updated.

Important: Over time, the Editorial Committee will be working to refine and improve this policy, and in particular to get closer to the guiding principles outlined in ‘A vision for a more trans-inclusive publishing world: guest article’, published on the COPE website. While our current process for handling name change requests does not guarantee the removal of the author’s previous name from all public-facing records, as recommended in the COPE article, we are currently exploring what systems and infrastructure improvements can be made to allow for more of these changes in the future.

Adopted: May 9, 2022

Notes:

1 We have drawn on SAGE’s Name Change Policy as the basis for our policy.