ACL Name Change Policy

ACL Name Change Policy

ACL recognizes the right of individuals to use the name of their choosing for their publications, including those in the past. For individuals who have changed their name, we offer multiple options:

1. Separate identities. Papers published under a new name remain unlinked with those published under the old one. This is the default behavior.
2. Linked identities. The Anthology can produce a consolidated author page merging together papers published under any number of different names. No PDFs or metadata are changed, but search results and links will direct to this page. Optionally, at the author's request, a correction notice can be displayed when someone searches for the old name.
3. New identity. Should an individual wish to change their name on prior publications, we will follow the following procedure.
   • Authors may submit their request by creating a Github issue or (for more privacy) by emailing the Anthology director.
   • Anthology staff will make the changes to existing papers using professional PDF editing software. The original files will be preserved privately in our archives.
   • Metadata corrections will be committed to the repository discreetly. Revised citation materials (BibTeX, Endnote, etc) are generated automatically.
   • We unfortunately are not set up to support name changes in reference sections of other papers.
   • We will notify our contact at Google Scholar, who will reingest the material.

We will make all efforts to complete these revisions expeditiously, though factors such as timing and the amount of work the request creates will affect completion time.

ACL committee on name changes
Shlomo Argamon, Jasmijn Bastings, Yusuke Miyao

Recommendations from the ACL committee on name changes

• The committee advises the ACL to carefully follow developments in digital publishing so that name changes can be made easier in the future, also to reference lists. For example, see this related effort around HTML: https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/01/19/access-is-not-the-same-as-accessibility-a-framework-for-making-research-papers-truly-open/. A separate committee could look into such "next-generation" publishing tech for ACL, and we can imagine the ACL adopting a framework developed externally, instead of the current process of storing PDF files. This, however, was out of scope for our committee.
• We recommend asking authors to confirm that their bibliography file(s) are up to date before submitting their paper (and again for camera ready). This will proactively help avoid incorrect names in references. Updating the anthology bib file is easy in Overleaf and reference lists can also be checked by software like aclpubcheck, which the ACL could advise, but not require, people to use.
• We recommend that conferences explicitly ask consent from authors whether or not their recording(s) and material(s) can be published on the anthology post-conference.
• We recommend that the ACL anthology provides a way (e.g., a link to a form) for authors to request the takedown of a recording such as a video.