Ask an author what happens to their copyright when they publish open access and you will often hear a worried "…do I lose it?" It is a reasonable fear, born of decades of subscription contracts that asked authors to sign their rights over to the publisher. Creative Commons licences work the other way round. Under the most common one, CC BY, you keep your copyright and simply give readers permission to do useful things with your work. Here is what that actually means in practice.
You keep your copyright
A Creative Commons licence is not a transfer of ownership; it is a standing permission. When your paper is published under CC BY 4.0, you remain the copyright holder. What you grant is a licence that lets anyone read, copy, distribute and build on your work — including translating it or including it in a review — provided they credit you and note any changes. You are not signing anything away; you are removing the need for people to email you for permission.
The licence family
Creative Commons is a family of licences that grant different levels of reuse. The two letters after "CC" tell you the conditions:
| Licence | Credit required (BY) | Commercial use | Adaptations |
|---|---|---|---|
| CC BY | Yes | Allowed | Allowed |
| CC BY-SA | Yes | Allowed | Allowed, but must keep the same licence |
| CC BY-NC | Yes | Not allowed | Allowed |
| CC BY-ND | Yes | Allowed | Not allowed |
| CC0 | No (public domain) | Allowed | Allowed |
CC BY is the standard for open-access research because it maximises reuse — including in meta-analyses, teaching materials and translations — while guaranteeing you are always credited. The "extra" conditions can seem safer but quietly block legitimate uses: NC (non-commercial) can stop your work appearing in a paid textbook or a company's training set, and ND (no derivatives) can prevent translation, which limits reach in exactly the regions that might benefit most.
What readers may — and may not — do
Under CC BY, a reader may reproduce your figures, quote at length, translate the article, and reuse it commercially, as long as they attribute you. What they may not do is imply you endorse their use, or strip your name off. The licence protects your authorship; it does not let others pass your work off as their own.
How to attribute a figure you reuse
If you want to include a figure from another CC BY article, you do not need to ask permission — but you must credit it. A complete attribution names the creator, the work, the source and the licence. For example:
Figure adapted from Smith et al. (2025), Journal of Example Medicine, https://doi.org/10.52338/example.2025.1, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Cropped and relabelled.
Note the last two words: if you changed the figure, say so. That single line keeps you compliant and keeps the original author credited.
The bottom line for authors
Publishing under CC BY, as Directive Publications does by default, means your work travels as far as possible while your name travels with it. You keep copyright, you get credited everywhere your work is used, and you never have to field a permissions request again.