Retrospective open access

When agreeing to the BMJ author licence during submission authors are required to select whether their article will be open access. Upon acceptance, authors are required to pay the Article Processing Charge (APC) to make the article open access. We recommend checking your funders requirements before submitting.

We appreciate that there may be circumstances when an author needs to make an article open access retrospectively (after the article has been published online) or change the Creative Commons licence associated with their article e.g. because it is a necessary requirement of their funder. BMJ will assist authors on a case-by-case basis in these scenarios.

Please note that BMJ cannot change an article that was published from open access to non-open access, or change a licence from CC BY to CC BY-NC. This policy does not apply to authors whose work is covered by an institutional Read and Publish agreement or an open access membership, where different conditions apply. Find out more about BMJ’s open access agreements.

When a licence is changed retrospectively, BMJ will update the copyright, licence and open access information of the article as a resupply. BMJ reserves the right to charge an administrative fee of GBP 200 in addition to the applicable APC for each resupplied article.

Changes are only possible until 15th January of the year following publication of the Version of Record (the date that the article is first published) in order to allow the correct calculation of BMJ’s double dipping policy.

Authors wishing to change the open access status or licence associated with their article should contact the Editorial Office contact for the journal, quoting the article DOI.