Are authors’ intellect and copyright safe and protected during peer review? Perspective of confidentiality from the prism of key stakeholders

Abstract

When authors submit an academic paper to a journal, they enter into a social contract with editors and peer reviewers. It is generally accepted that information in papers is both confidential and copyrighted; i.e., authors own their intellectual content, and editors and peer reviewers have an obligation to protect it. Here, we question whether it is ethically permissible for peer reviewers or editors to use or share information from a paper submitted to their journal while it is under consideration, or even after the journal rejects the paper. We argue that only verifiable ethical breaches or violations of codes of a journal’s conduct by authors, such as plagiarism or data theft, would allow editors the right to breach the author-journal contract of confidentiality and reach out to other editors, ethics groups, or university authorities to share relevant information from a submitted paper. In any other situation, including the use of generative AI in the review or editorial process, the absence of explicit permission from the authors is an editorial ethical breach and a violation of the publishing social contract. We draw on the ICMJE 2025 recommendations, but consider revisions to them, while highlighting a few case studies.