BMJ Product Manager Aradhana Mistry explains how we’ve made it easier to link peer-review activity to a reviewer’s ORCID profile. Trust and transparency are the pillars of peer review and here at BMJ we are now pleased to be able to further this by ensuring the reviewers across our portfolio of journals are instantly […]
Category: About the journal
Why we embrace open peer review at BMJ Open
Transparency has been at the heart of BMJ Open for its entire ten year history and a key component has been to operate a fully open peer-review system. We believe that this approach is the most equitable way of making the peer-review process a fair and collaborative endeavour. Concerns about single-blind review, which has […]
From locked-in syndrome to rock and roll, and everything in between
BMJ Open marks a decade of influential open access research From a Belgian survey, showing that many patients with locked-in syndrome aren’t necessarily unhappy, to a study showing that solo performers living the rock n roll lifestyle are twice as likely to die young as their band members, and everything in between, BMJ Open is marking a decade of influential […]
Top 10 Most Read in June: snus and snoring, long-term antibiotic treatment in times of resistance, the success of the NIHR Academic Clinical Fellowship, and serious video gaming for coping with pain
Six new articles made their way up to the Top 10 Most Read list of BMJ Open in June. Maintaining the top position for the second consecutive month is the systematic review and meta-analysis by Oliver Kennedy and colleagues establishing an association between coffee consumption and reduced risk of hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common type of liver cancer. […]
Top 10 Most Read: Negative primary care feedback from minority ethnic patients, higher caesarean sections in for-profit hospitals, adolescents’ sex and drug habits, and biased psychology
February sees five new entries in the top 10 most read articles. At number one this month is an experimental vignette study investigating why minority ethnic groups report poorer primary care experience in patient surveys. Burt and colleagues designed an experiment in the UK to determine whether South Asian people rate simulated GP […]
BMJ Open trials Penelope
We are pleased to announce that, beginning today, BMJ Open will be providing authors with the option to trial Penelope. Penelope is an automated online tool that checks scientific manuscripts for completeness and gives immediate feedback to authors. It has been customised to BMJ Open guidelines to help authors prepare for submission. Penelope was developed by […]
BMJ Open: highlights from 2016 in review
In 2011 BMJ Open appeared on the medical publishing scene becoming, in only five years, the world’s largest general medical journal (2015 – Five years old and growing). Another year has passed since then, and thanks to defining our distinctive identity, and being rigorous, open and transparent, we have continued to grow consistently and steadily, […]
Requesting clinical trial protocols
We have recently made some changes to our submission system. If we receive a clinical trial, we will now ask that authors include the original trial protocol. Editor-in-chief, Dr Trish Groves, explains why: Transparent reporting of research has always been at the heart of BMJ Open. From the very start the journal has published all […]
The importance of reviewers – 2015
The peer review process is central to scholarly research, a critical part of the publishing process and a method of quality control for the scientific community. While peer review can seem like a daunting, never-ending task at times, without it journals would not survive and continue to publish the important, accurate findings they do today. […]
Thank you to our reviewers – 2014
After a very busy year at BMJ Open, in which over 1100 papers were published, we would like to say a big thank you to all of our reviewers who contributed in 2014. All that we achieved last year would not have been possible without the help of the many referees who gave thorough and […]