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Cell recently received an unfamiliar request for advice about what it would do if a researcher had previously authored work in the journal, but since then, they’d gone through a gender transition and changed their name. They wanted to know if the publisher would adjust their previous article to reflect their chosen name rather than their birth name.
Normally, Cell would issue a correction to an author’s name if there was a mistake or it was incorrect at the time a study was published, but in this case, the name was correct at the time of publication. The journal’s editor in chief, John Pham, tells The Scientist in an email that the request “sparked an internal discussion,” so he reached out to Mika Tosca, a climate scientist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who is transgender, for her input. Pham knew her because ...
