The mission of the BMJ is to lead the debate on health and to engage, inform, and stimulate all doctors and health care researchers in ways that enable them to make better decisions and improve outcomes for patients.

Underpinning these aims, the BMJ has a set of ethical editorial principles, an ethics advisory committee, and a commitment to transparency. We try to ensure that readers, authors, and editors know as much about the background to each other’s work as possible. We do this through policies such as open peer review, declaring competing interests, and explaining the role of the bodies that fund research.

But there are many other policies and principles that help the BMJ to be an ethical publisher, and we have brought all of them together in this single transparency policy. You can reach the policies listed below simply by clicking on the links.

We will add to the BMJ’s transparency policy as often as we need to. Please contact us if you feel there is anything missing.

Requirements for all BMJ manuscripts

Please ensure that anything you submit to the BMJ conforms to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals. Our requirements reflect those of the ICMJE, although we also have specific requirements for different types of article and particularly detailed ones for research articles.

Other aspects of transparency

Please click on the links to find these policies:

• competing interests
• ethics approval of research
• BMJ ethics committee
• open access
• copyright and permission to reuse
• trial registration
• registration of observational studies
• data sharing
• authorship and contributorship
• editors' duty of confidentiality
• patient confidentiality
• publishing images of patients
• our peer review process
• previous peer review reports
• peer reviewing research done by BMJ editors
• editorial research at the BMJ
• informing workforces about results of occupational research
• previous publication
• duplicate publication
• press and embargo policy
• scientific misconduct
  
• plagiarism
• corrections
• article provenance
• who prompted this submission?
• role of professional medical writers
• reporting industry-sponsored trials
• competing interests of BMJ editorial staff
• competing interests of BMJ editorial advisory board
• BMJGroup advertising and sponsorship policy
• libel
• articles criticising doctors and others