You submit your thesis through a Moodle module. This is usually called 'Thesis Deposition for [School] PGR Students' or 'General Information for [School] PGR Students'. Your school admin team or supervisor will let you know how to find it.  

Watch this Depositing your thesis to KAR via Moodle video  

Go to the module and:

1. click Thesis Deposit Point, then Click here to start.
2. on the next page, choose one of the two options to decide the availability of your thesis.
3. read the terms and conditions and click Accept; if you want to choose a different option, click Back to return to step 2.
4. fill in the form and then upload your file(s); make sure you select the relevant 'embargo' option if applicable.
5. if you want to you can click Save for later.
6. when you are finished, click Submit to School Administrator - you will not be able to make changes after this.
7. you will return to the Deposits page which lists your thesis along with its status.

Your school administrator will check the details and publish your thesis to the Kent Academic Repository. If changes are needed they will reset your deposit to Draft status and tell you by email what you need to do.

Once the thesis is published, you can't make any more changes to it within Moodle.

If you have additional files which can't be incorporated into the body of your thesis, check how to prepare and deposit them.

Please email researchsupport@kent.ac.uk if:

• your thesis has not appeared in KAR within 5 working days
• you want to change an embargo.

If you are planning to publish your thesis as an article, book or chapter you may need to apply an embargo.

The publishers' view

When you make your thesis available in KAR the full text of your thesis will be available over the internet. Most publishers allow you to make your thesis available online in this way, so it's unlikely to affect your ability to publish your research in the future.

But some publishers take a stricter view of what constitutes publication. If you think this may be a problem, you can choose to embargo your thesis for a defined period.

See this list of publisher policies and attitudes towards thesis embargo and prior publication.

Consider commercial interest 

At an early stage, before publication, you should discuss with your supervisor whether there is potential commercial application to your work or any patentable subject matter. Please contact commercialisation@kent.ac.uk for advice as early as possible.  

Open Access, APCs and Read and Publish agreements

If you are writing articles during your PhD, you and your supervisor should discuss Open Access particularly in relation to the corresponding author role. PhD students are eligible under our Read and Publish agreements and to use our APC funds provided they are corresponding authors, identify as affiliated with Kent and use a Kent email address from the submission stage onwards. Please explore the Read and Publish options together using the Read and Publish journal search.

Your funder may have specific requirements. Sherpa Juliet provides details of these. In particular, students who are funded by a Training Grant from any of the UKRI research councils must follow the UKRI Open Access policy requirements. UKRI funded students should follow the Check before you choose workflow scenarios in our UKRI guide.  

If you take on the role of corresponding author you will need to do the following to benefit from the University’s Open Access opportunities:   

• use a Kent email address from the submission stage onwards 
• identify as affiliated to Kent from the submission stage onwards. The association with Kent and use of a Kent email address from the beginning of the process should be sufficient to ensure that the article is identified in publisher’s systems and platforms as eligible under an agreement with Kent.  This will mean that upon acceptance for publication approval of the article Open Access payment will come through to the library on our publisher dashboards where we will be happy to approve 
• provide your long-term private email address as an alternative contact address 
• add the article to KAR 

Already published?

If you have already published articles or chapters you want to refer to in your thesis, follow the steps in this blog post.

Find out more

For a more detailed explanation of the risks and benefits of making your thesis Open Access, read this blog post by our research support team.

• KAR and Open Access: email researchsupport@kent.ac.uk
• Copyright: email copyright@kent.ac.uk
• Choosing the best deposit option for your thesis: speak to your supervisor and the Submission Review Panel