After 10 years of providing free access to its peer reviewed research online, the BMJ officially became an open access journal. This coincided with the first international Open Access Day on the 14 October 2008. The BMJ's unique business model means that all research articles are freely available immediately on publication, regardless of whether or not they are publicly funded, with no charges to authors or readers.

Open access allows the sharing and reuse of publicly funded research without restriction to everyone everywhere.

In 1998, the BMJ became the first major general medical journal to provide free full text online access to its research articles, to deposit the full text in PubMed Central, and to allow authors to retain the copyright of their articles.

Changes to the BMJ's processes this year have brought it into full compliance with international open access policies but with a unique mixed revenue model, whereby access to research articles is currently funded through income from subscriptions and advertising rather than from author charges.   

The BMJ’s Open Access articles are all the research articles that we publish (irrespective of who funded the research) and any other article based on work funded by a funding organisation that requires open access publication – that is, requires its grant recipients to deposit publications arising out of the funded work to be deposited in PubMedCentral Open Access repository.

For these articles we do not require a copyright statement and we publish them under a Creative Commons licence (Creative Commons, attribution, non- commercial), that allows reuse subject only to the use being non-commercial and to the article being fully attributed. The BMJ makes these articles freely available on bmj.com from the date of publication and at the same time sends them to PubMed Central (see below).

Open Access Articles can be identified by the Creative Commons copyright statement that appears at the end of the article.

The BMJ also sends these articles, without further intervention from the author, to PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s full text article archive, where they are made fully available in PubMed’s Open Access Subset.

Please see the section of instructions to authors on Copyright, Open Access, and Permission to reuse