Publishing Identifiable Patient Photographs in Scientific Journals: Scoping Review of Policies and Practices.

This scoping review showed a diversity of practices in publishing identifiable patient photographs and an unsatisfactory level of knowledge of this issue among different stakeholders despite existing standards. Emerging issues include the availability of patients' photographs from open-access journals or preprints in the digital environment. There is a need to improve standards and processes to obtain proper consent to fully protect the privacy of patients in published articles.