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.
This commentary reflects on how Ancient Greek Literature is a rich archive of ecological communication. Bringing together classics, comparative literature, environmental humanities, and media studies, we suggest that reading the environment as a text should be understood as an ongoing practice of attunement to human and more-than-human interdependence. Thus, the ancient texts do not merely describe a lost world, but offer an enduring hermeneutics, transforming our contemporary ecological urgency into a dialogue with a deep past that is perpetually present.
This paper examines Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) through an ecofeminist framework informed by Karen J. Warren’s philosophy. The study explores how the film portrays the intersection between environmental collapse and patriarchal control, revealing how women’s bodies become sites of exploitation and resistance. By analyzing the film’s depiction of infertility, biopolitics, and ecological decay, the paper argues that Children of Men exposes the deep interrelation between environmental degradation and gender-based oppression. Through a close reading of visual and narrative elements, the study highlights how ecofeminist theory can illuminate the ways in which environmental and gender injustices are mutually reinforcing.
The study analyzes repeated offenders of scientific misconduct among authors affiliated with Indian institutions. To do so, we searched the SCOPUS database for retraction notices of articles written or cowritten by such authors. Broad categories of reasons for retractions, institutions, and the types of retracted publications were discussed. Most retractions (12.5% out of 239 retractions analysed) were from authors affiliated with S.V. University. The main reasons behind retractions were ethical misconduct (139, 58.2%) and scientific distortion (43, 18%). About one in ten authors who have at least one article retracted had more than one retracted publication.
This paper examines modal density, a concept introduced in Discourse Analysis by Norris [2004, 2009], in news media. Modal density combines intensity (modal prominence) and complexity (modal interactions), and is believed to vary across media genres and speech acts in climate change communication. Using data from UCLA’s NewsScape corpus, 500 short video clips from genres such as news reports, talk shows, weather forecasts and political speeches were analyzed. The study measured modal intensity and complexity across speech, prosody, and visual resources. Findings highlight differences across genres and speech acts, offering insights into multimodal strategies that promote public engagement with climate change. The study also introduces a quantitative method to compare modal density across genres, which improves our understanding of ecological discourse.
