The BMJ's ethics committee meets three times a year and has the ability to communicate 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:
   • 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.

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
• US Office of Research Integrity
• 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
• National Institutes of Health Bioethics Resources on the web
• Journal of Medical Ethics
• COPE - flow charts