MSP

In the event that a con­trib­ut­or to MSP journ­als changes their leg­al or pro­fes­sion­al name, they can re­quest that MSP ad­opt the change in MSP sys­tems, eras­ing the old name as much as pos­sible. MSP in­tends to hon­or such re­quests to the ex­tent prac­tic­able.

• On our serv­ers, and to the ex­tent prac­tic­able also on the serv­ers of part­ners that mar­ket MSP con­tent, a pre­vi­ously pub­lished work’s webpage will be changed to the new name in the au­thor-cred­it field. A reas­on­able ef­fort will be made to re­place the au­thor cred­it in each down­load­able file that em­bod­ies the work. In­dex­ing ser­vices will be no­ti­fied of the change, and MSP will fa­cil­it­ate up­dates in the re­spect­ive in­dexes by provid­ing cor­rec­ted metadata. Af­fil­i­ations and email ad­dresses of name changers will be treated sim­il­arly. (Af­fil­i­ations and email ad­dresses are not nor­mally up­dated out­side the con­text of a name change.)
• Presently it is not en­vis­aged that MSP will sys­tem­at­ic­ally al­ter bib­li­o­graph­ic entries to re­flect changes in the names of au­thors of such entries. However, if it comes to the at­ten­tion of MSP dur­ing the pre­par­a­tion of a doc­u­ment that an au­thor cited in that doc­u­ment has changed their name and wishes to be cred­ited un­der the new name only, MSP may choose to format the cita­tion us­ing the new name, over­rid­ing the usu­al bib­li­o­graph­ic­al prin­ciple that the form of an au­thor’s name in a cita­tion should re­flect what ap­pears on the cited doc­u­ment.
• In in­tern­al data­bases and in out­ward-fa­cing search mech­an­isms in­ten­ded to fa­cil­it­ate dis­cov­ery, MSP may pre­serve old names as needed to al­low track­ing and avoid con­fu­sion.
• In deal­ing with re­quests for name changes in pub­lished art­icles, MSP will per­form due di­li­gence to en­sure that names are not changed ma­li­ciously by third parties, and that name changes are not used to mask un­eth­ic­al or il­leg­al prac­tices. Spe­cific­ally, MSP may choose at its sole dis­cre­tion to ig­nore an ali­as for a per­son who en­gages in spam­ming or oth­er ab­us­ive or in­ap­pro­pri­ate be­ha­vi­or.
• This policy may be re­vised in light of fu­ture de­vel­op­ments, tak­ing in­to ac­count spe­cific­ally the amount of staff time needed to im­ple­ment it. However, it is en­vis­aged than any change made to web pages, down­load­able files and so on will be per­man­ent.