Community guidelines

Your use of our blog network

By commenting on our blogs, you are agreeing to abide by the following community guidelines (‘Guidelines’). Although we will do our utmost to avoid this, BMC reserves the right to delete, move or otherwise alter comments posted by users if they are deemed to violate these guidelines.

We ask that you:

• Keep comments to the subject matter of the post on which you are commenting.
• Don’t post anything that contains any material that is abusive, vulgar, obscene, hateful, fraudulent, unlawful, threatening, or harrassing towards any person whether a user on this blog or not.
• Don’t plagiarize.
• Don’t defame others.
• Don’t use posts to promote products or services.
• Don’t use third-party content without permission unless you are permitted to do so by copyright law.
• Don’t post any medical advice on our blogs, or accept any medical advice from other users.
• Don’t post any material which may be discriminatory or cause offence on the grounds of an individual’s sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability or working status.
• Don’t impersonate anyone else, including, but not limited to, any BMC staff, blog editors, or journal editors, or suggest that you have an affiliation with a person or association if you do not.
• Don’t upload, post, transmit, or make available, any material that contains viruses or any other computer code, programs or files designed to destroy, interrupt, or limit the functionality of any computer software or hardware or telecommunications equipment.

You are responsible for the content of any messages that you post.

You can complain about any comments that break the guidelines by emailing blogging@biomedcentral.com. We will monitor this inbox during office hours. We will respond to or act on all complaints within 48 hours.

Copyright and Third Party Rights

• You own the copyright to the material you post as a comment, but you agree to grant us perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive rights to publish your entry on any media.
• You agree that you will not use our blogs to post any copyright material or intellectual property that is not your own without the express permission of the copyright or intellectual property holder unless permitted by copyright law, in particular permitted as fair dealing (e.g. short quotations from a text for the purpose of criticism).
• You may add links to internal or external sites within your comment but you agree to remain responsible for any links you add. We reserve the right to remove any links we consider inappropriate.

Your data

• BMC requires you to enter a valid email address when you comment on the blog. This is first and foremost to contact you in the event of any problems or issues with your comment.
• We also reserve the right to contact you regarding the subject matter of the post on which you have commented, but we will not add your address to any other BMC mailing lists without your permission.
• We will not use your email address to send you commercial communication. We will not share your email with third parties unless we are legally required to do so.

Restricting Access

• Provided you stick to these common sense rules you may continue to access our blogs.
• We reserve the right to remove any comment breaking these rules without prior contact with the author. Our right to remove any post is not restricted to the reasons explicitly mentioned in these Guidelines.
• If you are responsible for any breach of these guidelines it will not be an excuse to say that you did not read them.
• As a last resort we may issue a ban (either temporary or permanent) if it becomes evident that you are unwilling to keep to these guidelines. This will only occur if we feel it is necessary to protect others or the integrity of the blogs.

General

We reserve the right to change these guidelines at any time. The current version of these Guidelines will always be available on blogs.biomedcentral.com/about. If you are uncertain about anything in them, please email us at blogging@biomedcentral.com or write to us at:

We will try to ensure the Website’s availability, but shall not be liable if for any reason the Website is unavailable for any period.

Disclaimer

Comments posted on our blogs, by persons other than the post authors, are those of the individual and in no way represent the views of BMC or its journals.