BMJ UK BMJ Americas BMJ Brazil BMJ China BMJ India

Author self-archiving & permissions

Author Self-Archiving & Permissions

When publishing in a BMJ Journal, authors choose between three licence types – exclusive licence granted to BMJ, CC-BY-NC and CC-BY (these Creative Commons open access licences require payment of an article publishing charge).

As an author, what you can do with your article, without seeking permission, depends on the licence you have chosen.

Author self-archiving

As the author you may wish to post your article in an institutional or subject repository or on a scientific social sharing network. You may also link your published article to your preprint (if applicable). For in-depth terms and conditions please see here:

Author permissions

Some rights to reuse your content may be covered by the author licence – in these instances permission does not need to be sought. Other uses will fall outside of the rights granted by the licence. To check if you need to seek permission to reuse your content please select the licence type your article was published under:

Conference abstracts

A different licence applies when publishing an abstract presented at a conference. Authors grant BMJ an exclusive licence to the work whilst retaining copyright, the right to reuse the abstract for non-commercial purposes and as part of future full length research articles. The licence can be found here.
If you have any questions about using your published abstract as part of future articles please email bmj.permissions@bmj.com with the details.

Contact us

Most permissions not granted by the author licence can be acquired through our online service RightsLink. Click ‘Request Permissions’ on the right hand side next to your article abstract. Further instructions can be found here.

If you have any questions please contact – bmj.permissions@bmj.com, with full details of your BMJ article and the use you wish to make of it.