Authors retain full copyright; every article is published open access under an irrevocable CC BY 4.0 licence.
Directive Publications is a fully open-access scholarly publisher. Every article we publish is released immediately under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, and authors retain copyright in their work. We do not require any transfer or assignment of copyright. This policy applies uniformly across all of our peer-reviewed journals in medicine, the life sciences and public health, and our copyright and licensing practices are aligned with the COPE Core Practices and follow the ICMJE Recommendations.
Last updated: 15 July 2026 (version 1.0).
Under this policy, authors (or, where applicable, their institution or employer) retain full copyright and all proprietary rights in the published article, including any patent rights and the right to reuse the work in future scholarship, teaching, theses and derivative research. Publishing with us involves no copyright transfer and no assignment of rights.
Instead, on acceptance the author grants Directive Publications a non-exclusive licence to publish, disseminate, archive and make the article available under CC BY 4.0. Because the licence is non-exclusive, the rights you keep are not diminished: you remain the copyright holder and may exercise every right an author holds, subject only to the public reuse permissions the CC BY licence grants to everyone (see Section 3).
By publishing with us, you make your article available to the world under CC BY 4.0. This licence is worldwide, royalty-free and irrevocable. It permits anyone to copy, distribute, adapt, translate and build upon the work in any medium or format, including for commercial purposes, provided they give appropriate credit to the author and the original source and indicate whether changes were made.
A Creative Commons licence cannot be revoked once granted. The reuse permissions extended to the public are irrevocable for any copy made while the article is available under CC BY — they cannot later be withdrawn. We ask authors to understand this before submitting, because it is central to open access: readers and downstream researchers can rely on their rights with confidence. Irrevocability applies to the public reuse grant only; it does not affect our ability to correct, update or retract the scholarly record where warranted (see Section 10).
No permission and no fee are required to reuse a Directive Publications article. Anyone may, without asking us or the author:
The only conditions are proper attribution and indicating if changes were made (see Section 6). No additional restrictions may be imposed on recipients.
Because articles are published under CC BY with no embargo period, authors may share the final published Version of Record — the typeset PDF and HTML — immediately upon publication. You may deposit or post it on:
We recommend that every posted or shared copy link to the article's Crossref-registered DOI (prefix 10.52338), so readers reach the citable, version-of-record source. These rights are ones we can back directly through the CC BY licence and the persistent DOI; we do not claim automatic deposit of your article into any external database on your behalf.
Attribution should follow the Creative Commons TASL framework — Title, Author, Source, Licence — plus an indication of any changes made.
A standard citation should include the author(s), year, title, journal, and the DOI, for example:
Author A, Author B. Title of the article. Journal Name. 2026. https://doi.org/10.52338/xxxxx
When reusing part of an article, include an attribution line such as:
"Figure adapted from Author A et al., Title, Journal Name (2026), https://doi.org/10.52338/xxxxx, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Changes were made."
Where no changes are made, simply omit the final sentence.
Authors are responsible for the copyright status of every element of their manuscript. If your work includes third-party copyrighted content — figures, tables, photographs, illustrations, instruments or extended quotations — you must:
Where possible, prefer public-domain or openly licensed material (for example, CC BY or CC0) that is compatible with our licence. Content that cannot be released under CC BY should not be embedded in the article; if such material is essential, discuss options with the editorial office before submission. Further expectations are set out in our author guidelines.
Reuse of any earlier material is governed by its original licence. Restrictively licensed content requires permission before it can be included. When you draw on your own previously published work, cite it explicitly and avoid redundant or overlapping publication; substantial overlap without disclosure is a research-integrity concern addressed in our publication ethics and editorial policies, consistent with COPE guidance. All submissions undergo similarity screening, as described in our plagiarism policy.
The copyright holder and the CC BY 4.0 licence are shown on the HTML article page and recorded in each article's machine-readable metadata, and the licence and copyright information are embedded in the article's PDF file metadata. Each article carries a Crossref-registered DOI (prefix 10.52338) and is exposed for discovery and harvesting via OAI-PMH and JATS XML. Making the licence obvious in both human- and machine-readable form is a recognised open-access best practice, and it lets libraries, aggregators and text-mining services identify reuse rights unambiguously.
A CC BY licence governs economic reuse rights; it does not waive the author's moral rights. You retain the right to be identified as the author and the right to the integrity of your work. Misattribution, failure to credit, and plagiarism remain violations regardless of the open licence.
The Version of Record — the finally published, DOI-linked article — is the definitive, citable version. Where the record must be amended, corrections, retractions and expressions of concern are issued in line with COPE guidance and are linked to the article's DOI, so the scholarly record stays transparent and traceable. Retraction concerns the integrity of the record and does not revoke the CC BY reuse rights already granted.
Persistent DOIs provide stable, long-term linking to every article. Content is protected by off-site backups, and we are pursuing a formal digital-archiving arrangement to strengthen long-term preservation.
Copyright, licensing and permissions queries are welcome. Contact the editorial office at [email protected] or write to Directive Publications, 30 N Gould St, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA. For transparency on any charges associated with open-access publication, see our publication charges and waiver policy. You may also wish to review our peer-review process, editorial policies, and how to submit your manuscript.