Rapid Responses are electronic letters to the editor. They enable our users to debate issues raised in articles published on bmj.com. Although a selection of rapid responses will be included as edited readers' letters in the weekly print issue of the BMJ, their first appearance online means that they are published articles.

Requirements

When you submit a Rapid Response, you agree to the following, which may be amended from time to time:

• You must declare any competing interests.
• We aim to post within 24 hours all responses that contribute substantially to the topic inquiries and we aim to post responses every day, and we run a rota to handle weekends; however, it is at our absolute discretion whether we publish any particular response.
• We won't publish responses, that we think are not appropriate, are likely to end us up in legal difficulties, and/or appear to be, obscene, libellous (or would require us spending time or money to establish that they aren't), in some other way illegal (for example, inciting racial hatred, contempt of court, breach of intellectual property rights), incomprehensible, insubstantial, written in capital letters, not written in English, almost entirely a quote from somewhere else, gratuitously rude, blatant advertising, or that give information on patients without their written consent, or are sent by someone who does not provide adequate and accurate personal details including a functioning email address, or from people we suspect have used an alias, or who does not respond to email 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 we 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
• 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
• If patients could recognise themselves from your description or anyone else could recognise the patient. please obtain the patients written consent to publication before sending your response. Download the patient consent form.
• Your response must be original and not infringe any third party's intellectual property right.
• 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.
• Your name will be published with your response. If you want your email address to appear on the website, include it in the body of the text of your response.
• We reserve the right to edit responses before and after publication.
• Once a response has been published on the website, you will not have the right to have it removed or edited in any way. The BMJ shall, however, be able to remove any article at its absolute discretion.
• Individual editors largely make judgements on their own. Occasionally editors consult each other.
• 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.
• All responses are eligible for publication in the paper or other versions of the BMJ and all other BMJ Group publications and can be sub licensed to third parties for their use as deemed fit by the BMJ Group including within local editions, and in all of the foregoing these are within any media known now or created in the future.
• 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.