** To search resources for authors, please use the index on the left within the resources pages or the "Search all BMJ products" box at the top left corner of every bmj.com page. **

Thank you for considering the BMJ for submitting your article. Lower down this page you will find, as well as links to more detailed advice, basic guidance on:

• how to submit your article to the BMJ
• fast track peer review process
• open access
• open (signed) peer review
• trial registration policy
• continuous publication on bmj.com
• abridging research articles for the print BMJ
• appeals
• editing and proofs
• reprints
• provenance of articles
• who prompted this submission?
• editorial research

How to submit your article to the BMJ

PLEASE DO NOT SEND ARTICLES TO THE BMJ BY POST. Please send all submissions electronically to our online editorial office  - except letters to the editor, which should be sent to bmj.com as rapid responses to articles we have published, and obituaries which should be sent as Word files to obituaries@bmj.com.

Fast track peer review process

When research articles are of exceptional clinical importance and urgency or where there is a public policy reason for urgent publication we can fast track their internal and external peer review and offer full online publication within four weeks of submission.

Open access

The full text of every accepted original research article in the BMJ is immediately published on bmj.com as soon as the proof is approved and free to everyone at no charge (we also provide open access to other articles where the work was funded by a grant with an open access mandate). The full text of all research articles is also sent without delay (and without further intervention from the author) to PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine's full text archive, thus making the article fully accessible. This means that the BMJ immediately fulfils the requirement of the US National Institutes of Health, the UK Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and other funding bodies to make publicly funded research freely available to all.

Open peer review

The BMJ asks all reviewers to sign their reports, saying briefly who they are and where they work. We also ask reviewers to declare to the editors any competing interests that might relate to articles we have asked them to review. Open peer review does not mean, however, that authors should feel able to contact reviewers directly to discuss their reports; all queries should still be directed through the editorial office.

Trial registration

In accordance with ICMJE uniform requirements the BMJ will not consider reports of clinical trials unless they were registered prospectively before patient recruitment. This applies to trials which commenced after 1 July 2005: for older trials retrospective registration will be acceptable, but only if done before submission of the manuscript to the journal. Eligible trials have been defined by ICMJE since 1 July 2008 as trials "where human participants are prospectively assigned to one or more health-related interventions [including health services and behavioural interventions] to evaluate the effects on health outcomes" and before that were defined more narrowly, as trials where "human participants are prospectively assigned to investigate the cause and effect relationship between a medical intervention and  health outcome".

The BMJ does not consider posting of protocols and results in clinical trial registries to be prior publication.

Continuous publication on bmj.com

The BMJ publishes its articles continuously to bmj.com, so each day there is new content. We then select from among published content to make up a weekly print issue. When the print issue appears (every Friday) the PDFs are available on bmj.com together with links to the online articles that are also contained in that week’s print issue. Each online article has a unique identifier, in place of a page number; this identifier (elocator) should be used when citing any BMJ article. The form of the citation—eg BMJ 2008;337:a134—appears on all articles both online and in print, and it will appear thus in PubMed and other indexes. Please see the Frequently asked questions about our publishing model.

Abridging research articles for the print BMJ

We publish abridged versions of some articles in the print BMJ, particularly of original research articles, after publishing their full, citable versions on bmj.com. We are currently piloting a new style of abridged research article, called BMJ pico, and now have real published examples for most study designs.

Appeals

Peer review by editors and external reviewers is usually based on a mix of evidence and opinion and may not always lead to the best decision. We welcome serious appeals at our online editorial office and many succeed. Please don't send a revised paper to our online editorial office, however - the first step is to submit there a detailed rebuttal letter. We can consider only one appeal per article.

Editing and proofs

All material submitted for publication must be submitted exclusively to the BMJ. Proofs are sent to authors of all articles except letters, obituaries, drug points, medicine and the media, fillers, and career focus.

Who had the idea for the article, and was the article externally peer reviewed? At the end of every accepted editorial, research article, clinical review, practice article, analysis article, feature, and head-to-head article the BMJ will add a statement explaining the article's provenance. The options are:

• not commissioned; externally peer reviewed
• not commissioned; not externally peer reviewed
• commissioned; externally peer reviewed
• commissioned; not externally peer reviewed
• commissioned, based on an idea from the author; externally peer reviewed
• commissioned, based on an idea from the author; not externally peer reviewed

Who prompted this submission?

We may ask authors submitting or offering unsolicited articles, particularly reviews and editorials covering topics with related commercial interests, several questions before proceeding. Even if the answers to all of these questions were "yes", we wouldn't necessarily reject the proposal or article. We appreciate that companies can commission some excellent evidence based work and that professional writers can present that evidence in a particularly readable and clear way that benefits readers and learners. We would, however, expect such companies' and writers' contributions to be mentioned in the article. And we would want to know that the BMJ article did not overlap by more than 15% with any similar publications or submissions written by the same authors elsewhere. Here are the questions:

• has anyone (particularly a company or public relations agency) prompted or paid you to write this article?
• would/did a professional writer contribute to the article, and to what extent?
• would the BMJ article be original, or would it be similar to articles submitted or published elsewhere?

Editorial research

We have an ongoing programme of editorial research , for example we have conducted randomised controlled trials on open peer review and on peer review training. If you do not want your article entered into such a study please let us know by emailing papersadmin@bmj.com as soon as possible. Your decision to participate or not will have no effect on the editorial decision regarding your submission.