How Directive Publications delivers immediate, CC BY 4.0 open access — with authors retaining copyright
Directive Publications is a fully open-access scholarly publisher. Every article we publish across our journals in medicine, the life sciences, and public health is immediately and freely available worldwide from the moment of publication — to read, download, print, and reuse. There is no subscription, no paywall, no login, no registration wall, and no charge to any reader. Each article is served as both full-text HTML and a downloadable PDF.
This is gold (immediate) open access, applied uniformly to all of our journals. We do not operate hybrid or embargoed tiers: readers never wait, and nothing behind our name is locked away from the global research community, practitioners, students, or the public who help fund research.
Open access has two dimensions, and Directive Publications provides both:
Many "free-to-read" articles elsewhere stop at the first dimension, leaving reuse rights unclear. We deliberately grant full reuse rights up front, in the spirit of the Budapest Open Access Initiative's vision of research that is free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The mechanism we use to deliver those rights is the Creative Commons Attribution licence, described next.
Every article published by Directive Publications is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. This is the most permissive standard licence that still requires only attribution, and the option preferred by most major research funders.
You can review the licence in two forms:
Once an article is published under CC BY 4.0, that licence is irrevocable. The rights it grants to readers and reusers cannot later be withdrawn, which gives everyone who relies on our content long-term legal certainty. We apply CC BY as a licence to the work — it is not an affiliation with, or endorsement by, Creative Commons.
Under CC BY 4.0, anyone is free to:
for any purpose, including commercial use. This covers translating an article, including it in a systematic review or meta-analysis, reproducing figures in a textbook or presentation, text- and data-mining at scale, and incorporating findings into teaching or clinical resources.
The licence carries a single condition — attribution (see Section 5). Beyond that, reusers may not add any legal terms or technological measures (such as digital rights management or other DRM) that would legally restrict others from doing anything the licence permits. Open content must stay open downstream.
The only obligation placed on a reuser is to give appropriate credit: name the author(s), provide a link to the licence, and indicate if any changes were made. Credit must be given in a reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the author or Directive Publications endorses you or your use.
A ready-to-use attribution and citation example (replace the placeholders with the real article details):
Author A, Author B. Title of the article. Journal Name. 2026; https://doi.org/10.52338/xxxx.2026.0000. © The Author(s). Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Every article also displays its own recommended citation and offers export in common reference formats. Detailed manuscript and referencing guidance is in our author guidelines.
Authors retain full copyright in their work without restriction. There is no copyright transfer and no assignment to the publisher. By publishing with us, authors simply grant Directive Publications a non-exclusive right of first publication and the right to distribute the article under the CC BY 4.0 licence. All patent, trademark, and other intellectual-property rights remain entirely with the authors.
Following recognised open-access best practice:
Our full statement is also summarised on the copyright page.
Because the Version of Record (the final published article) is itself CC BY, authors enjoy unusually broad self-archiving freedom. Authors may immediately and with no embargo deposit or share the final published PDF in:
The only expectation is that the original publication is properly cited. This is a genuine advantage over embargoed subscription "green" open access, where authors are often barred from posting the published version for months.
Directive Publications imposes no embargo period on any version of any article. The Version of Record is free to read, download, and reuse from the moment it is published. There is no delayed-access window and no "author's accepted manuscript only" restriction.
Our model — immediate gold open access, a CC BY licence, author-retained copyright, and unrestricted deposit of the Version of Record — directly supports the licensing, immediate-open-access, and rights-retention dimensions that research funders and institutions increasingly expect.
Because funder requirements differ, evolve, and may carry additional conditions beyond the licence and access model, we advise authors to confirm the specific policy of their own funder or institution before submission. We are glad to help authors understand how our licensing supports their obligations — contact us at the address in Section 15.
Authors are responsible for ensuring that any material they did not create themselves can lawfully be released as part of a CC BY article. When a manuscript includes third-party figures, tables, images, extended quotations, datasets, or other content:
Material whose rights status is unclear, or which cannot be released compatibly with CC BY, cannot be published and must be removed or replaced. Related integrity expectations are set out in our publication ethics and plagiarism policies.
Because readers pay nothing, open access is sustained by article processing charges (APCs) paid on acceptance — not by subscriptions or reader fees. Charges are disclosed at submission and available on request, and we consider waivers and discounts for authors who need them.
We do not quote a figure here so that authors always see the current, journal-specific amount. Full details are on the publication charges and waiver pages; our refund policy explains how charges are handled if circumstances change.
These standards support indexing and interoperability with the wider scholarly ecosystem; we continue to pursue inclusion in additional discovery services over time.
Published content is protected through secure off-site backups, and Directive Publications is actively pursuing a formal digital-archiving arrangement to strengthen long-term availability. We describe this honestly: we take preservation seriously and are building toward a recognised archiving solution, and we will update this policy as those arrangements are confirmed.
Our editorial and licensing practices follow the COPE Core Practices and the ICMJE Recommendations. All submissions undergo double-blind peer review and similarity screening before a publication decision. Because we license articles openly, integrity at the point of acceptance is essential — errors in the published record are handled transparently.
See our publication ethics, peer review, and corrections and retractions policies for the full framework, and editorial policies for how decisions are made.
You generally do not need to ask permission to reuse our content — CC BY 4.0 already grants it, subject to attribution. For licensing questions, unusual reuse scenarios, or rights queries, contact our editorial office:
Ready to publish open access with us? Explore our journals, submit your manuscript, or join our reviewer community.