ITAL Policy to Support Name Changes on an Author’s Prior Publications

Policy

Approved by the ITAL Editorial Board: 26 May 2021.
Updated 22 September 2021.

ITAL recognizes that authors may change their names for many reasons, including—but not limited to—gender identity, marriage, divorce, or religious conversion. We respect that there may be sensitivities surrounding name changes and wish to reduce or remove any barriers to inclusion, professional mobility, and author credit.

Our current policy is to change, upon request of the author, any or all the author’s first, middle, and last names, initials, honorifics, and salutations, as well as other references to the author throughout the paper such as pronouns, captions, acknowledgements, and email addresses that contain names/initials in the full text (online HTML), PDF, and metadata records of those papers. There will be no acknowledgement in the article that this change has been made.

The ITAL Editorial Board continues to work with other ALA publications and divisions as well as the NISO 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 to refine and improve this policy.

It is important to note that ITAL cannot control the use or appearance of an author’s name on non-ITAL products or content (such as external indexing services and archives). Changes made to prior ITAL publications may not propagate to downstream environments.

Author's Steps

Authors who wish to change their name on prior publications they have authored may do so by following the instructions below:

Step 1: Ensure that the name and ORCID iD (if applicable) listed in your ITAL author account has been updated. You can update your ITAL author account by visiting https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/ital/user/profile and logging in with your ITAL username. Once logged in, your name, honorific, and ORCID iD can be updated. If you’re unable to update your ITAL profile, please notify us when you submit your request form (Step 2) and our Editorial Board will assist you.

Step 2: Complete the ITAL Name Change Request Form.

  • Confirmation that ITAL user profile has been updated
  • Previous name
  • Current name
  • Current email address
  • List of articles that need updating. For each, please provide [text area]:
    • Article title
    • Article DOI
    • Author name as it appeared
  • Acknowledgement of where ITAL can and cannot change author information

Step 3. The ITAL Editor may contact you to discuss the details of making the change on the published articles and/or metadata on the ITAL website. 

If you have questions, please contact Ken Varnum, Editor, at varnum@umich.edu.