Authors may need to change their name on already-published articles for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to:

• To reflect their identity (may differ from legal documents)
• Married name variation
• Religious practice
• Lived names in multiple languages (Heriberto vs. Ed)
• Lived names in different communities (home vs. field/work)
• Survivors of abuse and/or trafficking

• Contact namechange@lbl.gov
• Ask us how to start the process. You can choose to have us assist you or if you prefer to contact publishers on your own, we can provide you with helpful guidance.

• No legal documentation is required to prove the name change; however, you are required to complete and sign the Berkeley Lab Name Change request form to initiate the process. This form provides Berkeley Lab with the necessary authorization to act on your behalf. Request forms will be treated as confidential, and only used to fulfill name change requests.
• To request a form, contact namechange@lbl.gov
• The following individuals have access to your email request (if preferred, either of these can be contacted directly instead):
  Joerg Heber, RCO, Research Integrity Officer
  Christine Higgs, RCO, Research Integrity & Policy Manager
  Lady Idos, IDEA, Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer

• When publishers update an author name on research articles, the article will be recreated with the author information and any other requested changes (pronouns, biographies, etc.) implemented. Publishers will usually not issue correction notices to the paper, so the change is done silently. However, publishers may inform the corresponding author of a paper and/or inform all co-authors.
• Contact us at namechange@lbl.gov if you have questions about the practice for specific publishers.
• Some publisher policies can be found on this page under the List of Participating Institutions.

• We will copy you into each email with a publisher.

• • Names (including first, middle, last, and/or initials)
  • Pronouns, salutations, initials and/or shorthand references to the author in the body of the manuscript (including captions, acknowledgments, dedications, biographies, and author notes)
  • Email addresses (when the email address reflects the author’s name)
  • In-paper self-citations and reference lists

Other related changes may also be possible, contact us at namechange@lbl.gov for details.

Publishers may be able to implement the following changes as part of their regular corrections workflow, but not in relation to a name change.

• • Requests to update email addresses on prior publications when not in relation to a name change
  • Changes to scientific content, minor adjustments to text, corrections beyond those indicated by name change
  • Requests for affiliation changes to prior publications
  • Changes to author names in printed books
  • Posthumous changes
  • Use of symbols or characters outside of the publisher’s standard
    publishing character set, which is based on the Latin alphabet
  • Inconsistent presentation of initials or name misspellings

Publishers may not be able to address changes to content beyond research articles. The following updates may be out of scope for the current version per the publisher’s policy, although many publishers are actively working to find solutions to each of these issues for additional content that they host, such as:

• • Meeting Abstracts
  • Other publisher web content outside of journals (such as blog posts)
  • Citations outside of the publisher’s ecosystem; due to the complexity of citation networks, they cannot guarantee that other publisher and third-party tools will have updated citations. However, all of the participating organizations in the National Laboratories Name Change Initiative For Published Research Outputs are working toward making this possible.

• Publishers may not always be able to update the indexing of articles that they have changed, although they will update Crossref. We will contact indexing services such as Web of Science and Scopus with name changes to research articles. Let us know if other indexing services are of relevance in your research field.

• We have agreements with the preprint server arxiv and the protocols publisher protocols.io to implement name changes in their content. We might be able to implement name changes on other research outputs such as preprint servers, journals not covered by our agreements, indexing services, data repositories and others. However, such changes might not be possible in all circumstances.

• No. You will need to log into their site and update your name there. To update membership information with academic societies, contact the relevant membership department to make a request.

• This practice may vary from publisher to publisher. Contact us for details about specific publishers. However, if you prefer you can request the publisher notify your co-authors.

• This depends on the publisher’s policy. Most publishers have not established any date before which they will not consider changes.

• Both the HTML and PDF versions of the article will be updated.

• This depends on the publisher’s policies but to support name changes anonymity, prior name searching will not be enabled on most publisher’s websites. Some publishers are exploring the feasibility of offering prior name searching to authors in the future, which, when the author opts in, would enable searches using an author’s prior name even if that name no longer appears in the published article.

• We cannot guarantee an expected turnaround time. There are other factors to consider such as the publisher’s process, the number of documents affected, age of documents affected, and challenges that the publisher may need to troubleshoot and solve associated with the process. We will work closely with the publisher and researcher to communicate expectations and updates. Ideally, we would like the turnaround to be 1-2 weeks but we will continue to update this FAQ after we have gained experience to get a better understanding of the average turnaround time.

• No

• Yes. Contact us at namechange@lbl.gov to explore that option.

• Yes. Visit the IDEA page, Gender Identity and Transition in the Workplace for helpful resources.
  
• UCOP Policy: Gender Recognition and Lived Name.