Ethics Committee
Ethics Committee
The BMJ's ethics committee meets quarterly and communicates regularly by email. Collectively, the members have broad expertise including clinical medicine, research, journalism, bioethics, law, and medical editing.
The committee has six main roles:
1. Clarifying, reviewing and developing editorial policies on issues such as:
- consent to publication of material arising from the doctor patient relationship (Read our guidelines on consent to publication)
- competing interests for authors, reviewers, editors, and ethics committee members
- prior disclosure of results to research participants
- editors' duty of confidentiality to authors
2. Formulating new editorial policies
3. Advising editors on ethics questions that arise during routine editorial work. This includes scrutinising papers referred by editors or peer reviewers worried about some aspect of the conception, design, conduct, presentation, authorship, or peer review of the work described in those papers.
4. Advising editors on their moral duties and responsibilities to patients, research participants, authors, reviewers, publishers, other editors and readers.
5. Helping editors to enhance the coverage of bioethics in the BMJ
6. Keeping editors informed of developments in research and publication ethics.
Some useful references:
Research ethics
American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC)
Canadian guidelines on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans
NHS Research Ethics Committee
Indian Council of Medical Research’s Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research on Human Subjects
Office of Research Integrity (US)
World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki
Publication ethics
International Committee of Medical Journal Editors
Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
World Association of Medical Editors (WAME)
Ethics resources on the web
Applied Ethics Resources on the web
Journal of Medical Ethics online link resource
National Institutes of Health Bioethics Resources on the web
COPE - flow charts
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