Changes to copyright of BCMJ content

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 63, No. 10, December 2021, Pages 412-413 News

CC BY NC ND licence iconStarting in 2022, copyright for articles published in the BCMJ will be held by the article’s authors or their institutions under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0). Copyright for articles published prior to 2022 will continue to be held by the Association of Doctors of BC, the BCMJ’s publisher/owner.

The CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license allows anyone to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format as long as they follow these terms:

  • Attribution—You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
  • Noncommercial—You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
  • No derivatives—If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.
  • No additional restrictions—You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Any use of materials from the BCMJ must include full bibliographic citations, including journal name, author(s), article title, year, volume, and page numbers. If you would like to request permission to use content published prior to 2022, or if you have any questions, please contact journal@doctorsofbc.ca.

The new copyright requirements are reflected in the “Authorship, copyright, and disclosure form” that authors must complete when submitting a manuscript for publication consideration. The new form is available online at www.bcmj.org.

. Changes to copyright of BCMJ content. BCMJ, Vol. 63, No. 10, December, 2021, Page(s) 412-413 - News.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

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