Rights, licensing and permissions

Rights, licensing and permissions

At BMJ, we want our journal content to be available for the medical community worldwide. Therefore, we offer a comprehensive suite of licensing services to meet the needs of institutions, healthcare companies, and publishers worldwide. 

Author self-archiving and permissions 

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

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

As an author, what you can do with your article without seeking permission, depends on the license 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 license – in these instances, permission does not need to be sought. Other uses will fall outside of the rights granted by the license. To check if you need to seek permission to reuse your content, please select the license type your article was published under:

Conference abstracts

A different license applies when publishing an abstract presented at a conference. Authors grant BMJ an exclusive license 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 license 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.

Permissions – The BMJ and BMJ Journals Collection

We offer the Copyright Clearance Centre’s Rightslink licensing solution for ALL BMJ Journal reuse permissions.

RightsLink

We offer the Copyright Clearance Centre’s Rightslink licensing solution for all BMJ Journals’ reuse permissions.

The Rightslink service is quick and easy to use.  You will get a quick price and instant permission to reuse BMJ content in many different ways.  Please see the following instructions:

  1. Go to our Journals or The BMJ site and locate the content you wish to reuse

  2. Click on “Request Permissions” in the footnotes of the full-text article or under the Share tab to get to the Rightslink Permission webpage

  3. Follow the instructions in the pop-up window

For additional information, see our Frequently asked questions or contact customer care:

RightsPlatform from Lumina

You can now search BMJs rich medical image content through Lumina’s online RightsPlatform Marketplace. Lumina leverages tagged metadata from BMJ assets to empower search for visual content. There are hundreds of MRI scans, X-Rays, disease presentations, surgical images, and graphs available. In addition, you can use your own search criteria to look for images without searching through whole journal articles. 

Go to the RightsPlatform and enter your search terms. From here, you can seamlessly search images and use their simple e-commerce system to purchase the rights you need. 

Republication service

Please visit CCC’s copyright.com service for broad-ranging rights or articles without a RightsLink link, please visit CCC’s copyright.com service.

PLSClear

The Publisher’s Licensing Society portal, PLSClear, offers a UK-based permissions service for BMJ content.

STM Permissions Guidelines

BMJ is a signatory of the STM permissions guidelines. BMJ is happy to participate in decreasing barriers to researchers and facilitating the process of scientific publishing in journals.

BMJ’s participation in the Guidelines applies to signatories only when reusing content in journal articles. Signatories reusing BMJ content in books and other products will be charged a permission fee. Likewise, BMJ will pay permission fees to reuse any signatories’ book content in our products. Our RightsLink implementation reflects this.

It should be emphasized that these are just guidelines, and requests should still go through RightsLink or be emailed to the BMJ Permissions department.

Author Permissions

As the author of a work published by BMJ, you retain some rights to reuse the work. Please see Author Self-Archiving & Permissions above to find out more.

Modifications

Please note that our automated permissions do not allow you to alter the material other than making stylistic changes. If you wish to adapt the material, please send a draft of the revised work and a full reference to the original to bmj.permissions@bmj.com.

Permission Requests

For any reuse rights not available on RightsLink or www.copyright.com (including multiple rights for a campaign), please complete this form, and someone from the BMJ Permissions Department will be in touch.

Non-journal content

BMJ Learning, BMJ Best Practice, and BMJ OnExamination

To reuse content from other BMJ products, please send full details of your request to bmj.permissions@bmj.com

Multimedia

RightsLink and other automated services do not cover permission requests to reuse videos, visual abstracts, and podcasts: please send full details of your request to bmj.permissions@bmj.com.

You can now acquire permission to use infographics via RightsLink: on the infographic’s webpage, click Request Permissions and select Infographic as the portion. If you wish to use only a portion of an infographic, please send full details to bmj.permissions@bmj.com

EULAR textbooks

To reuse material from any of the EULAR Textbooks, please contact bmj.permissions@bmj.com

Western Journal of Medicine

Please contact our Permissions team if you wish to reuse content from the Western Journal of Medicine or any other discontinued BMJ content.  Tel: +44 (0)20 7383 6640 bmj.permissions@bmj.com, and our permissions team will send a link to a RightsLink window to reuse the content.

Licensing

What do you get when you license Journals content?

We have gained our reputation through over 150 years of commitment to the highest standards.  We work in the long-term interests of healthcare, and this will always take priority over short-term gain. We recognize that licensing agreements are important to our success.   Everything we do is designed to help move medical knowledge forward.  We are constantly looking for new and better ways to make our information more useful and effective to medical professionals worldwide.

The Rights & Licensing team has a broad remit. We are always interested in new ways to present our products and content in different markets, territories, and new audiences.

BMJ’s licensing offering includes:

  • Syndication
  • Document Delivery
  • Content Licensing
  • Local Editions

 We license everything from individual figures and tables to large selections of articles from journals. 

We are currently licensing the following content:

  • Figures, tables, extracts
  • Journal articles
  • Learning modules
  • Patient leaflets
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Blogs
  • Podcasts
  • Guidelines

We are happy to consider personalized agreements for your projects. We have 25 years’ experience licensing custom editions. These are BMJ branded editions of journals, including specially selected articles, translated articles, commentaries by key opinion leaders, Learning modules, and CME questions. 

Photocopying and use under pro-copyright licenses

If you hold a license from the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), or an equivalent Reproduction Rights Organization (RRO), you may not need to contact us to request permission for a wide range of uses. Depending on the license you hold, these may include copying for internal meetings, use in presentations (but not for sales or marketing purposes), emailing to colleagues, and many educational uses. Please refer to your license for detailed terms.

For more information, don’t hesitate to get in touch with CLA, CCC, or your local RRO.

Reprints

Reprints of original articles from The BMJ, Journals, and evidence-based journals, are a cost-effective and authoritative way of providing information on advances in medicine and new therapeutic areas. If you wish to purchase multiple stand-alone copies of a BMJ paper.

World and UK: Please get in touch with Nadia Gurney-Randall ngurneyrandall@bmj.com

North America and Latin America: Please get in touch with Ray Thibodeau ray.thibodeau@contentednet.com Tel: 1(267) 895-1758 Mobile: +1(215)933-8484