Ethics Committee

The LJPC has an ethics committee that meets quarterly and communicates regularly by email. Collectively, the members have broad expertise including clinical medicine, research, journalism, bioethics, law, and medical editing.

The committee has five main roles:

1. Clarifying, reviewing and developing editorial policies on issues such as:
• consent to publication of material arising from the doctor patient relationship
• 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 LJPC
6. Keeping editors informed of developments in research and publication ethics.

The committee's role is advisory. The editor can ignore its advice, but must justify his action to the chairperson in writing: the editor's and chairperson's comments will be published. The chairperson can appeal to the journal committee of the LJPC in the event of a dispute.

Decisions made by the committee, the minutes of its meetings, and its annual report are posted on www.londonjournalofprimarycare.org. Any papers discussed by the committee and mentioned in these reports are anonymised first.

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

Useful Links

Research Ethics

- American Association of Medical Colleges
- Canadian guidelines on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans
- Indian Council of Medical Research Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research on Human Subjects
- Office of Research Integrity (US)
- World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki

Publication Ethics

- International Committee of Medical Journal Editors
- Committee on Publication Ethics
- World Association of Medical Editors

Other Resources

- Applied Ethics Resources on the web
- Journal of Medical Ethics online link resource
- Bioethics Resources on the web