Please note these important points:
- all material submitted for publication must be submitted exclusively 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.
- 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.
- 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, though - the first step is to submit there a detailed rebuttal letter.
- Editing: material accepted for publication will be edited
- Abridged versions: we produce abridged versions of original research articles in the printed BMJ while publishing their full versions on bmj.com
- Open access and deposition in PubMed Central: the full text of every original research article in the BMJ is immediately accessible on bmj.com and free to everyone at no charge. 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.
- Proofs: these are sent to authors of all articles except letters, obituaries, drug points, medicine and the media, fillers, and career focus
- Provenance of articles - who had the idea, 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, these questions before proceeding:
- 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?
- How do we handle the answers to these questions? 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.
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Reprints: we are pleased to provide
reprints. We pay authors a total of 10% of net receipts from sales of reprints and translations
of their article (on orders in excess of £1500 (2225euros;
$2965) and for up to five years after publication)
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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.
