The BMJ will remunerate patient and public reviewers

Why are we launching this scheme?

Over 1000 patient and public reviewers are currently signed up to review for The BMJ. We find that patients and the public are willing to review, respond quickly to accept or decline invitations, produce timely reviews, and often raise insightful points. However, we recognise that increasing requests to review may place additional demands on a limited pool of reviewers. The question of making this additional remuneration to clinical and methodological peer reviewers is less clear cut, albeit their time is no less valuable or appreciated. They may, for example, regard manuscript review as part of their academic role and professional duty.6 We will, however, keep this under review since we fully appreciate that reward systems for peer reviewers are inadequate.

We are committed to increasing the diversity of our patient and public reviewers. We want to expand the areas of lived experience and increase gender, ethnic, and geographical diversity. Our current reviewers are predominantly women and are based in the UK or the US, although we have registered patient reviewers in more than 20 countries. Half of completed reviews over the past 10 years were from reviewers based in the UK, 25% from the US, 5% from Canada, and the remaining 20% from other nations. Feedback from our current reviewers and our international patient and public advisory panel highlighted that offering remuneration could enable a wider range of people to contribute. We hope this announcement, and more focused invitations, will help to increase reviewer diversity and topical expertise.

When surveyed, our patient and public reviewers told us they valued the BMJ online subscription that they currently receive and would like access to more of our journals and other training resources.7 This is why we will offer patient and public reviewers the choice between a £50 payment or a 12 month online subscription to another BMJ journal. We don’t yet know what implications remuneration will have on our processes, reviewer enrolment, or our patient and public reviewer experience, and we will continue to review and report on our progress.

We welcome all patients, carers, and members of the public to sign up to be reviewers with us here (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeOgqn-j5rwYVfkIhrQCB1eTONlA3AyzygMJGOldxVZBjwSLQ/viewform). We are proud to be the first medical journal to routinely implement patient and public review and to make patient and public involvement declarations mandatory for our papers. We remain grateful to all our reviewers for their sustained and valuable input over the past 10 years. We hope existing and new reviewers will continue to help us lead the way to work in partnership with patients in all that we do.