KEY TAKEAWAYS
- From January 2025, The BMJ is offering £50 or a 12-month online subscription to a BMJ journal for patients and members of the public who review an article.
- The BMJ hopes the policy will help to expand and diversify participation from its patient and public reviewers.
Patients, advocates, and public reviewers play an important role in the reporting of medical research by offering their lived experiences and perspectives. Starting from January 2025, The BMJ is complementing the 12-month BMJ online subscription given to all reviewers, adding £50 or a 12-month online subscription to any BMJ journal for patient and public reviewers.
The BMJ introduced patient and public reviews in 2014 and have accumulated over 2,600 patient and public reviews across various article types. These help to evaluate:
- the relevance and importance of research questions
- the appropriateness of outcome measures
- how patient and public involvement is reported.
The new BMJ policy aligns with National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) guidelines on payments for public involvement in research and aims to:
- compensate the time and effort of patient and public reviewers
- expand and diversify patient reviewer participation.
Expanding representation in patient and public reviews
While The BMJ has over 1,000 engaged patient and public reviewers from over 20 countries, most reviews in the past decade were conducted by women based in the UK and US. The experiences of patient reviewers for The BMJ are positive, and their feedback has helped develop further guidance and training. Feedback from current reviewers and an international patient and public advisory panel also underpins the latest change in compensation.
The BMJ hopes that remuneration will diversify participation in reviews and increase representation.
The BMJ hopes that remuneration will diversify participation in reviews and increase representation across:
- geographic locations
- ethnicities
- genders
- areas of lived patient experiences.
How will this change the future of peer review?
The BMJ announcement acknowledges the value of patient perspectives in medical research, sitting alongside other initiatives to amplify patient engagement in scientific publications and address barriers to participation. However, broader discussions persist around whether clinical peer reviewers should be compensated and how to sustainably improve the peer review process while maintaining quality and integrity. The BMJ plan to monitor the impact of the new policy – we look forward to reading their updates.
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