Copyright stays with you
Authors retain copyright in the articles they publish in Peer Academics. The journal does not ask you to transfer copyright and does not ask for an exclusive assignment. You remain the owner of your work after publication and may continue to use it — in teaching, in a thesis, in a book chapter, in a later article — without asking the journal for permission.
What the Publisher needs is not ownership but permission: a license from you that allows the journal to publish the article, keep it available, and let readers use it. That license is granted in writing at the point of acceptance, before publication, and never earlier. Nothing you do during submission or peer review transfers any right in your work.
The license: CC BY 4.0
Every article published in Peer Academics is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Publisher selected it on 15 September 2026, before the journal's first article was published, and it applies from the first article onward. The terms are:
- authors retain copyright;
- CC BY 4.0 applies journal-wide, to every published article, and is not chosen per article;
- it covers the article text and the published article file, and any supplementary files and datasets deposited with the article, unless a supplementary file carries a different license stated on the file itself;
- it is displayed on each article's landing page and in the article metadata exposed to harvesters;
- the website itself is not covered — see below.
CC BY 4.0 lets anyone copy, redistribute, adapt, and build on the work, including commercially, provided they credit the author, link to the license, and indicate any changes. It is the most permissive of the Creative Commons licenses short of a public-domain dedication, and it satisfies funder mandates that require CC BY and nothing narrower.
Two commitments bind the journal, as stated in the Publishing Model: no article is published until the license applying to it is stated on the article itself, and you are asked to agree to the copyright and licensing terms in writing before publication. If you do not accept the terms offered, your manuscript is not published, you owe the journal nothing, and you may submit the work elsewhere immediately.
What this means for you
- In a data availability statement, a funder report, or an institutional deposit, state the license as CC BY 4.0, citing https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- If your funder or your institution requires a narrower license than CC BY — some mandates restrict commercial reuse or derivatives — tell the editor at submission, in the comments to the editor, because the journal applies CC BY 4.0 journal-wide and does not vary it per article.
- If you posted a preprint under a license of your own choosing, check that it is compatible with CC BY 4.0. An incompatibility has to be resolved before acceptance, not after. See the Preprints Policy.
Third-party material in your article
You are responsible for every piece of material in your article that you did not create: figures, tables, photographs, maps, screenshots, long quotations, questionnaire instruments, and archival documents. Before acceptance you must either establish that the material may be reproduced without permission — because it is out of copyright, or because a statutory exception applies — or obtain written permission from the rights holder covering publication in an open-access journal and onward reuse by readers. Send copies of permissions to the editor when asked. Where permission cannot be obtained, or is granted on terms narrower than CC BY 4.0, the material is removed, replaced, described in words instead, or published under a separate, clearly labelled license stated in the figure or table caption; an article is held until the point is resolved.
What you confirm when you submit
By submitting, you confirm that the work is yours, that you have the right to publish it, that it infringes no one's copyright, and that every named author has agreed to submission — see Authorship and Contributorship. An infringement claim that is later upheld is handled under Corrections and Retractions.
Attribution, moral rights, and citation
CC BY 4.0 requires attribution, and your right to be identified as the author of the work is unaffected by it. Because Peer Academics has no DOI prefix, cite an article by the journal name, the volume, the article number, and the article URL; anyone reusing your work should attribute it the same way.
The website itself
Copyright in the journal's website — its design, its logo, its name, and the pages other than articles, including this one — belongs to the Publisher, Center for Academic Research and Innovation of European Union Students Society Association. The license applied to articles does not extend to the site or its branding. Use of the site is governed by the Terms of Use.
Questions and complaints
Questions about copyright, permissions, or licensing go to editor@peeracademics.com. If you believe content published by Peer Academics infringes your rights, write to the same address, identify the article and the material precisely, and state the basis of your claim. Where a claim is well founded the material is removed or corrected and a public notice explains what changed.