The official REF 2021 Open Access policy  applies to journal articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN that have been accepted for publication after 1 April 2016.

To be eligible for the REF, you need to:

• keep your Author Accepted Manuscript
• note the date your publication was accepted
• deposit your publication in the Kent Academic Repository (KAR) within a set period
• carefully consider publisher embargo periods

• Get started with our Summary guide (pdf)
• Find out which version of your article you need to submit
• Find out if your chosen journal complies: Checking journal compliance (pdf)
• What to do with your Conference and workshop items (pdf)
• Not sure what any of the terms mean? Check the Open Access glossary (pdf)

REF Assisted Deposit is a service for researchers. We’ll upload these publications to KAR for you:

• journal articles
• published conference papers

Please send your item as soon as possible after acceptance by the publisher.

Only recent publications can be added via this service. If you are a new member of staff and you wish to add your previous outputs to KAR, please see Ways to add records to KAR on the webpage. Please email researchsupport@kent.ac.uk if you need help importing publication details.

Send us your publication

Use this short online form. 

We need the post-peer-review version, also called author accepted manuscript.

What happens next

We'll prioritise requests by acceptance date. We may need to email you if we need any extra information that we can't get from the publisher website.

Papers published via the Gold Open Access route comply automatically, but you must still make a record of your article available in KAR.

No specific licence is mandatory.

Need research support or advice? Email researchsupport@kent.ac.uk

Find out all the ways you can get in touch.