Operating procedures for rapid responses

Operating procedures for rapid responses

  • We aim to post responses every day, and we run a rota to handle weekends
  • We make no distinction between different types of respondent: doctors, health professionals, non-doctors, patients, people from the UK, people from other countries, members, non-members, etc. We pay attention only to the content
  • Individual editors largely make judgements on their own. Occasionally editors consult each other
  • Clearly, we don't post things that are likely to end us up in legal difficulties: libel, obscenity, contempt of court, sub judice, breach of copyright, etc but it is for us to decide whether we believe it appropriate to post responses.
  • We make our own judgements on the sorts of legal things mentioned above, rather than refer them to our lawyer. By far the commonest problem we see is libel. In nearly all cases the responses don't warrant us spending money to confirm our judgement that something is libellous (and we have experience from cases where we have consulted our lawyer that our judgement is usually right) and don't warrant making an effort to substantiate defamatory letters. The same applies to other breaches - contempt of court, copyright, etc
  • We expect to post nearly everything, but we don't post responses that give information on patients without their written consent or are:
    • obscene
    • libellous (or would require us spending time and money to accept that they aren't)
    • in some other way illegal (for example, inciting racial hatred)
    • insubstantial
    • incomprehensible
    • gratuitously rude
    • blatant advertising
    • written in capital letters
    • not written in English
    • almost entirely a quote from somewhere else
    • sent by someone who does not provide adequate personal details, including a functioning email address, or who does not respond to email inquiries or we suspect is using a pseudonym.
  • Authors are responsible for the accuracy of what they say in their rapid responses. We cannot check facts, though we may challenge authors if we think they are wrong and may ask them to substantiate what they say- for example by giving a reference. We also do not check references to say that they really say what they are claimed to say: that too is the author's responsibility
  • If only a line or two of an otherwise OK response is defamatory or extremely abusive, we may delete the line and post the rest
  • While we try to deal with all our authors in as courteous and timely manner as possible, because our threshold for posting rapid responses is low, dealing with tricky rapid responses is a low priority for us
  • We do minimal editing. We place the onus for correct spelling and punctuation firmly on the authors, and we won't correct these errors before or after publication
  • We try to avoid entering into lengthy correspondence about why we have not posted a rapid response. Again, it's not a good use of our resources and it is at our discretion
  • Letters with figures and tables may take longer to post - because we have to ask our production operators to handle the formatting and posting of graphics

BMJ in the Media