Invited by the Foundry IDEA Committee
Date: Tuesday, February 8, 2022
Time: 11:00 am
Talk Title: Being Who You Are: Gender Recognition and Name Changes in Academia
Zoom Link

Abstract:
The credit and reward system in academia is focused on researcher names. It is authorship on journal articles and on other research outputs, collected in databases such as Web of Science, that is defining a researcher’s reputation and career output. The credit system is very rigid, and not attuned to the recognition of lived names if they change over time. In situations where researchers do not like to be associated with a prior name, or where this would even be harmful, it is difficult for researchers to claim credit for their entire published record.
In this seminar, I will talk about the support that institutions such as Berkeley Lab can provide for their researchers in implementing name changes and lived names in the research environment. In particular, the Name Change Initiative of the DOE National Laboratories is partnering with publishers and others in the publishing ecosystem to implement name changes on published research outputs. In doing so, the National Labs can utilize their joint institutional expertise towards making the process of name changes more equitable. Once a researcher decides to change their name it can be overwhelming to identify where names need to be changed, or how to correct them. Institutions can offer support throughout this process and can take on a lot of the administrative burden. In doing so, the initiative supports researchers receiving appropriate recognition for all their career achievements.
Biography:
Joerg is the Research Integrity Officer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and leads the Research Compliance Office. Previously, he was editorial director at Public Library of Science (PLOS) and editor-in-chief at PLOS ONE; he was responsible for editorial strategies and editorial development of all PLOS journals and he held editorial responsibility for PLOS ONE. Before that, he was executive editor of Nature Communications, where he managed the editorial teams and was responsible for the journal’s editorial strategy. At Nature Communications, he implemented the journal’s transparent peer review initiative and contributed to its transition to open access publishing.
Prior to joining Nature, Joerg was a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo and lecturer at Philipps-University Marburg, Germany. Joerg obtained his PhD in semiconductor physics at Imperial College in London and did postdoctoral work at Bell Labs.