The Cover Name Collective is an initiative dedicated to protecting student authorship. I founded it after watching students hesitate to publish or present their work because using their legal names could expose them to risk from immigration enforcement, surveillance, or discrimination.
Many of these students were writing or presenting on issues of social justice, immigration, or inequality, or they were students from underrepresented backgrounds or who had families made vulnerable by immigration status or public visibility. They are afraid of being targeted, especially when attending conferences or events where their name and location were made public.
This framework is a never-digital, fully offline way for students to register their authorship under a pseudonym. Every record is created, signed, and stored on paper. It is never uploaded, never stored in a database, and never connected to any institutional system.
Our mission is simple: to make sure every student can share their work, earn credit, and build their future without fear. This is resistance through recordkeeping.
The Cover Name Collective functions as a handbook and template for other faculty, librarians, and institutions who want to build similar systems. Everything here is shared freely for adaptation under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
This work is grounded in the idea of resistance through recordkeeping: protecting authorship by refusing the systems that endanger it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Cover Name Collective?
It’s a framework for creating safe, analog authorship registries for students whose legal identity could put them or their families at risk. The system is faculty-run, never digital, and intentionally independent from universities or government databases. The Collective does not collect data or manage records centrally; it provides a model and tools for others to replicate locally.
Who is this for?
This handbook is written for faculty, librarians, and institutions who want to implement this system responsibly and ethically on their own campuses. The model itself was created for students in the United States who face real risks from being publicly identified by name, especially those vulnerable to immigration enforcement, surveillance, or discrimination.
If you’re a student seeking safety while publishing, you can share this site or the sample form with a trusted faculty mentor, who can use it to establish a local version of the Collective.
If you publish under a pseudonym for creative or personal reasons and wish to maintain a verifiable connection between your names, we recommend creating a free ORCID iD account. ORCID allows you to link pen names or project aliases to your legal identity safely and professionally.
Why “never digital”?
Digital systems, even when encrypted, can be subpoenaed, hacked, or silently surveilled. Universities, public institutions, and third-party storage providers are often required to comply with data requests from government agencies, including ICE. Keeping the registry never digital ensures that no electronic trail of identifying information exists for anyone to access, intercept, or trace.
By keeping records entirely offline, faculty can ensure that no digital trace of a student’s identity exists for anyone to access, intercept, or demand.
The recordkeeping happens on paper only, stored securely by a small, trusted network of people.
What happens to the records?
In the original UCSB model, records are sealed and held offline until the constitutional and human rights violations committed by ICE and related agencies have ceased and until it’s reasonably safe for students to reclaim their authorship.
At that point, the records may be made public or used by students to verify their authorship externally. Each local implementation should decide its own conditions for release, always prioritizing safety and consent.
Does this provide legal protection?
No. The Collective does not provide legal advice, protection, or representation. Publishing under a pseudonym is entirely legal, as is maintaining a private, offline record of authorship. This model exists to help document authorship ethically, not to provide legal shelter.
Who created this model?
I’m Professor Annie K. Lamar, a faculty member at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I created this model after witnessing students hesitate to publish or present their work for fear that their names could expose them or their families to risk. My role is to share the framework, mentor others who wish to adapt it, and advocate for authorship systems that value both safety and recognition.
How can I adapt this for my campus?
You can download and modify the sample Cover Name Collective Registration Form and follow the steps outlined in the Implementation Guide on this site.
All materials are shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license, meaning you’re free to reuse, adapt, and share them noncommercially, as long as you credit the project and maintain its principles of offline recordkeeping and distributed trust.
How to Cite this Framework
I only ask for citation because it helps establish credibility for the framework and build a cohesive community of faculty and institutions working toward the same goal: protecting vulnerable authorship through ethical, analog practices. Every acknowledgment strengthens the visibility and legitimacy of this shared effort.
All materials are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). You are free to reuse, modify, and share this model noncommercially, as long as you credit the original project and preserve its principles of offline recordkeeping, student safety, and institutional independence.
Suggested Acknowledgment
This project adapts the Cover Name Collective model (Lamar 2025), developed at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which provides a framework for protecting student authorship through offline, distributed recordkeeping.
Suggested Citation
Lamar, A. K. (2025). Cover Name Collective: A Handbook for Protecting Student Authorship. University of California, Santa Barbara. Retrieved from https://covernamecollective.org
Cover Name Collective 