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Comment by yoshuaw | Hacker News Reader

Oh that’s great to hear! I really like arXiv and am glad it’s getting more funding! I hope this will enable arXiv to fix some of the long-time issues it has, including the way identity and attribution are handled.

For example: the current system assumes people’s names do not change [1], which in particular negatively affects trans authors. This seems like it could be fixed if they had the bandwidth to, and I hope they will.

[1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

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There is no good way to deal with name changes. You can change them in the metadata, but the old ones will still be around in the paper itself. You can let authors change them in the paper, but the old ones will still be around in others' bibliographies. You can't do much about the bibliographies, since (1) you'd need an automated way to find them all and disambiguate them (have fun with Chinese names) and (2) a lot of authors will reject the idea that someone else changes their papers.

For disambiguation there's ORCID, and for the citation there is nowadays the DOI to identify the paper. So long as you can update whatever the DOI points out with a note it seems like this is handled?

OK, so I typically use DOIs in my bibliographies, although I seem to be in the minority for now. What next? You have to find the exact name of the author that changed and edit it. Let's say you do so (not a trivial undertaking since references do not come in a standardized format even if the DOIs do; by the way, arXiv doesn't understand bibtex). Now my paper says "Merton and Fox observed in [5] that...", and you know that Fox (one of the authors of the [5]) became Wolf. Will you change my text to "Merton and Wolf observed in [5] that..."? How can you tell that this particular "Fox" is a surname rather than the animal? What about acknowledgments, which come with no DOI or ORCID?

You make a good point that one should use the newish \orcidlink facility whenever one first bothers to type out the name of an author.

It doesn't seem quite as critical when the name is only part of the citation, so long as the ORCiD is in author list at the other side of the DOI.

But I think you misunderstand me regarding who should do the work: the original author is in charge of ensuring their ORCiD is included in the author list and that its entry is kept updated.

If you are just citing a work, just give the doi and whatever authorlist you found at the time.

Then I'd say that if you want to refer to a specific author of a work, you need to lookup their ORCiD and use whatever they specify as their preferred name. Also include the ORCiD itself so that the next researcher to come along knows where to find the up to date name.

This is more trouble than it's worth for the mathematicians of today. What exactly is gained from these ORCIDs? A DOI auto-generates a clickable link, allows for automatic reference tracking, and (hardly an intended feature but perhaps the best one) helps readers find a copy in places like sci-hub and LibGen (on sci-hub, DOI is the only lookup option that currently works). With an ORCID, I could make it double-clear that the D. E. Knuth I'm citing is the real Donald Ervin Knuth. Nice, but I'm supposed to learn a new command and spend 10 minutes researching authors per paper for that?

It much more negatively affects women who choose to or are compelled by societal expectations to take their husband's surname.

They just keep their maiden name for science and it seems to work fine?

The standard convention in citation is to follow the format:

FI, MI, Last. For instance, if an individual changes their last name from Davidson to Mitchell, the change would manifest as follows:

Suppose an author named Susan Thomas Davidson (S.T. Davidson) decides to change her last name, becoming Susan Thomas Mitchell. The citation would then be updated to (S.T. Mitchell).

This alteration retains the consistent impact as the last name, serving as the clear identifier, undergoes the change."

Most research scientists I know just use their maiden name indefinitely for ‘work’. No one gets confused. Medical Dr’s too.

Not sure about that, the convention is to cite however someone appears on the paper right? That way everything is consistent.

You must not change history. You can use a new name, but that should be considered a new and separate identity.

So if someone changes their name, they start from scratch? That seems a bit unfair.

If I change my phone number or email, that's on me to notify anyone. I [voluntary] broke the world's consistency, I must repair it. Same with names.

I'm not opposed to requiring notifying people of a name change. But they should change my name in their records when I notify them.

(I'm currently going through this process.)

Agreed, what is needed is a way to link the old and new identities so others can know that it is the same person.

It seems arXiv does support name changes, just not in citations and references[1]

This seems… fine? To modify citations would be a strange alteration of history and an intrusion on authorship.

If someone quotes this comment and cites it as “bigyikes” and later Dang changes my name, should he also edit the comments that quote me? I don’t think so, but maybe I’m in a minority here.

[1]: https://blog.arxiv.org/2021/03/11/update-name-change-policy/

The link you shared seems great, thank you! I was talking to a friend just yesterday who regularly publishes to arXiv, and my understanding was that changing author names on papers where they weren’t the primary author wasn’t possible. But from the link you’ve shared it seems they’ve made the steps needed to address that. I think this means I might be able to deliver some good news!

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