Manuscript transfer

BMJ has the facility for transferring manuscripts among journals in its portfolio. Authors submitting to The BMJ and other BMJ journals can choose BMJ Oncology as an ‘alternate journal’ if their paper is rejected from the first choice journal.

Once authors agree for their manuscript to be transferred to another BMJ journal, all versions of the manuscript, any supplementary files and peer review comments will automatically be transferred on the author’s behalf. Please note there is no guarantee of acceptance and the editor of the receiving journal may require further peer review before making a decision. Contact the editorial team for more information or assistance.

ORCiD

BMJ Oncology mandates ORCID iDs for the submitting author at the time of article submission; co-authors and reviewers are also strongly encouraged to connect their ScholarOne accounts to ORCID. We believe that the increased use and integration of ORCID iDs will be beneficial for the whole research community. Please find more information about ORCID and BMJ’s policy on our Author Hub.

Data sharing

BMJ Oncology adheres to BMJ’s Tier 2 data policy. Authors are strongly encouraged to make the research data associated with their article available as soon as legally and ethically possible. We also require data from clinical trials to be made available upon reasonable request. To adhere to ICMJE guidelines, we require that a data sharing plan must be included with trial registration for clinical trials that begin enrolling participants on or after 1st January 2019. Changes to the plan must be noted in the Data Availability Statement and updated in the registry record. All research articles must contain a Data Availability Statement. For more information please see the data sharing policy.

Reporting patient and public involvement in research

BMJ encourages active patient and public involvement (PPI) in clinical research as part of its patient and public partnership strategy. To support co-production of research we request that authors provide a PPI statement in the Methods section of research papers, under the subheading ‘Patient and public involvement’.

The PPI statement should provide a brief response to the following questions, tailored as appropriate for the study design being reported:

• • • At what stage in the research process were patients/the public first involved in the research and how?
    • How were the research question(s) and outcome measures developed and informed by their priorities, experience, and preferences?
    • How were patients/the public involved in the design of this study?
    • How were they involved in the recruitment to and conduct of the study?
    • Were they asked to assess the burden of the intervention and time required to participate in the research?
    • How were (or will) they be involved in your plans to disseminate the study results to participants and relevant wider patient communities (e.g. by choosing what information/results to share, when, and in what format)?

In addition to considering the points above we advise authors to refer to guidance for reporting of PPI as set out in the GRIPP2 checklist.

If the PPI statement is missing, we will request that authors provide it. If patients were not involved in the research, please state this in the manuscript. We appreciate that PPI is relatively new and may not be feasible or appropriate for all research papers. We will therefore continue to consider papers where patients were not involved.

Rapid responses

Readers’ responses to published articles are welcomed by BMJ Oncology and should be submitted online: click the ‘Rapid response’ tab on the article page and follow the instructions. Rapid responses are moderated but not peer reviewed; they do not receive a DOI and are not indexed. Please find further details on how to submit a response and the terms and conditions. All responses are posted subject to editorial approval and must conform to BMJ’s terms and conditions.