I agree with Cristina Muñoz-Pinedo that researchers and scholars should have unique identifiers such as those provided by ORCID, but I object to the singling out of Chinese scientists for not complying with the system (Nature 565, 161; 2019). When different cultures seek to do business, all parties need to make compromises.

Although “millions of Chinese people share the same 100 last names”, millions do not — there are more than 5,000 surnames in China. The 100 most common Chinese surnames are used by roughly 80% of the country’s population (see go.nature.com/2sjqufi; in Chinese), a situation that would hold for any country with a large enough population. There are probably many scholars with the last names García or Hernández, say, in Muñoz-Pinedo’s Spain and in the Spanish-speaking nations of Central and South America.

In my view, Nature and other journals should follow an initiative by the Journal of Biological Chemistry and the Journal of Neuroscience (see go.nature.com/2xhiIj5), among others, to list authors in the script of their own language — whether Arabic, Urdu, Kanji or other — as well as in the Roman alphabet and in ORCID or similar. If you can accommodate accented letters in European names, you should extend comparable courtesy to other international scholars.