Policy making during crises: how diversity and disagreement can help manage the politics of expert advice

We are implementing fully open peer review for Analysis articles in The BMJ. This means that accepted Analysis papers submitted from February 2016 onwards usually have their prepublication history posted alongside them on thebmj.com.

This prepublication history comprises all previous versions of the manuscript, the report from the manuscript committee meeting, the reviewers’ comments, and the authors’ responses to all the comments from reviewers and editors.

In rare instances we may determine after careful consideration that we should not make certain portions of the prepublication record publicly available. For example, in cases of stigmatised illnesses we seek to protect the confidentiality of reviewers who have these illnesses. In other instances there may be legal or regulatory considerations that make it inadvisable or impermissible to make available certain parts of the prepublication record.

In all instances in which we have determined that elements of the prepublication record should not be made publicly available, we expect that authors will respect these decisions and also will not share this information.