When you finish your thesis it will be available in the Kent Academic Repository (KAR). KAR is Kent’s Open Access institutional archive, through which your thesis is publicly available and downloadable. So there are some things you should think about in relation to copyright and the use of other people’s work in your thesis.
Your thesis may contain material for which you don’t hold the copyright, for example:
- quotations, such as passages of text or music
- images, such as photographs, maps, charts or graphs
Is it acceptable to make these freely available online in your thesis?
Don’t panic – follow these guidelines
We have a set of webpages that explain the whole process of depositing your thesis in KAR. For copyright questions we’ve outlined on our theses webpages about other people’s copyright the steps you can go through to work out what to do if you are using other people’s work in your thesis.
Use our copyright checklist
You can also use our checklist for use of other people’s copyright in PhD theses (docx) to record your investigations and evidence your decisions.
When you’ve submitted your thesis and it is published in KAR, please email your completed checklist to researchsupport@kent.ac.uk and we will archive it alongside your thesis in KAR if you wish. You do not have to use this checklist, it is provided purely for guidance and reassurance.