The Journal does enforce a policy of obtaining the signatures of all authors before accepting a manuscript for publication. In this instance, confusion has arisen because of uncertainty over the authorship status of members of a study group. This issue has now been clarified in our ‘Instructions to authors’ as follows:
The Journal does not consider to be authors people thanked in the Acknowledgements or listed as members of a study group on whose behalf a paper is submitted, but whose names do not appear as authors on the title page of the manuscript, or whose signed agreement to the manuscript's submission has not been obtained. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to ensure that authorship is agreed among the study's workers, contributors of additional data and other interested parties, before submission of the manuscript.
Full text of these Instructions is located on the Royal College of Psychiatrists' web-site (http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pub/bjp_ita.htm) and is next scheduled for paper publication in the July issue of the Journal.
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