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BMJ No 7122 Volume 315 Education and debate - Commentary Saturday 13 December 1997 Your letter failed to win a place... The editor's decision is final Liz Crossan, Richard Smith See Education and debate, p 1608 Last year the BMJ received about 3,850 letters for publication. We had space to publish about 1,200 in the paper journal. We cannot increase the number of pages we devote to letters for two reasons - readers do not want us to and we could not afford to do so. We give priority to letters offering cogent criticisms of material we have already published, but we cannot publish all these letters. Some have to be rejected. We hope soon to post almost all letters on our web site within days of receiving them. Only those that are libellous, obscene, or incomprehensible will be excluded. We will then make a selection in the normal way for publication in the paper journal, aided perhaps by comments on the letters posted on the web site. We do not plan to peer review externally all letters as Dr Shahar suggests, mainly because we see letters as a form of peer review. As Dr Shahar points out, we do not externally review the comments of peer reviewers. We have to stop somewhere, and we choose to stop with peer reviewers' comments and with letters for publication in response to published material. Again this is a question of resources - peer reviewing all letters externally would be time consuming and expensive. Ideally, we would offer all authors of rejected papers and letters a specific explanation for the rejection. Again, we don't do this because of resources. We do not want to increase the price of the journal (and if we did our resources might be reduced because fewer people might subscribe), and we want to concentrate resources on improving the quality of what we do publish rather than on supplying justification for rejecting material. We will always, however, explain why something has been rejected when authors ask us to do so. British Medical Journal, London WC1H 9JR Liz Crossan, letters editor Richard Smith, editor Correspondence to: Ms Crossan Home | Current issue | Past issues | Classified ads | Career Focus | Feedback Collections | About this site | About the BMJ | BMA | Medline