Confidentiality and Privacy Guidelines for Guest Editors

For all journal entries, Guest Editors must follow the guidelines for the anonymisation of clinical material as published by PEP-Web. To accomplish this, Guest Editors are required to:

1. Proactively seek and obtain confirmation that their authors have undertaken specific and detailed efforts to appropriately anonymise case material;
2. Alert reviewers to pay careful attention to the issue, and confirm that reviewers have considered the issue as part of their review;
3. Confirm that authors, reviewers, and supervisory editors have kept careful but discrete records of their decision-making.

In this way both editors and publishers can have the confidence that clinical material as presented in an article will contain no information that will allow a third party to identify the patient and minimise the risk that the patient will recognise her/him/themselves.  As a result, the patient will find no grounds for complaint about breach of confidentiality or reputational damage.