Ethics committee

How the committee works

The BMJ's ethics committee meets in person three times a year. Between meetings, editors can consult members by email. Collectively, the members have broad expertise including clinical medicine, research, journalism, bioethics, law, and medical editing. Responses are coordinated by the chairman and a decision is made by majority. The chairman will make decisions without consulting other members only in exceptional circumstances.

The committee is advisory. The editor can ignore its advice, but must justify his action to the chairman in writing. The advice and the editor's response would both be published. In the event of a dispute, the committee's chairman can appeal to the journal committee of the BMA.

Roles of the committee

The committee has six main roles:

1. Clarifying, reviewing and developing editorial policies on issues such as:
Material arising from the doctor patient relationship (read our guidelines on consent to publication).
Competing interests for authors, reviewers, editors, and ethics committee members.
Prior disclosure of results to research participants.
Editors' duty of confidentiality to authors
2. Formulating new editorial policies.
3. Advising editors on ethics questions that arise during routine editorial work. This includes scrutinising papers referred by editors or peer reviewers worried about some aspect of the conception, design, conduct, presentation, authorship, or peer review of the work described in those papers.
4. Advising editors on their moral duties and responsibilities to patients, research participants, authors, reviewers, publishers, other editors and readers.
5. Helping editors to enhance the coverage of bioethics in The BMJ
6. Keeping editors informed of developments in research and publication ethics.

The committee does not provide approval for research proposals, and it is not the last-resort destination for complaints or editorial decision support. Complaints and editorial decisions can be brought to the committee for information; and COPE can be contacted for more direct advice.

The BMJ's ethics committee members

Siobhan O'Sullivan (chair)
Kamran Abbasi, editor-in-chief, The BMJ
Theodora Bloom, executive editor, The BMJ (since 2014)
John Coggon (since 2009)
Helen Park (since 2018)
Matt Phillips (since 2018)
Emma Doble, patient editor, The BMJ (since 2018)
Helen Macdonald, publication ethics and content integrity editor, BMJ Journals
Zelda Doyle
Katharine Wright
Melissa McCullough
Sophia Walker
Sridhar Venkatapuram

Observers:
Helen Beynon, Research Integrity Manager, BMJ Journals (minute-taker)

The committee is recruited through open advertisement in the lay press and the The BMJ, and we welcome applications from both within and outside the UK.