6,000 and counting: Cambridge Vice-Chancellor joins Stephen Hawking in making his PhD ‘Open Access’
Cambridge also becomes first UK university to publish position statement on Open Research.
Cambridge also becomes first UK university to publish position statement on Open Research.
Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis, ‘Properties of expanding universes’, has been made freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world, after being made accessible via the University of Cambridge’s Open Access repository, Apollo.
Reproducibility is the idea that an experiment can be repeated by another scientist and they will get the same result. It is important to show that the claims of any experiment are true and for them to be useful for any further research. However, science appears to have an issue with reproducibility.
The University of Cambridge has received its 10,000th Open Access submission – highlighting its commitment to making research freely available to anybody who wants to access it, without publisher paywalls or expensive journal subscriptions.
Virginia Barbour, Executive Officer, Australasian Open Access Support Group, Australian National University; Danny Kingsley, Executive Officer for the Australian Open Access Support Group, University of Cambridge; James Bradley, Lecturer in History of Medicine/Life Science, University of Melbourne; Keyan Tomaselli, Distinguished Professor, University of Johannesburg; Lucy Montgomery, Director, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University, and Tom Cochrane, Adjunct Professor Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology answer questions about open access.
© 2026 University of Cambridge