Overall, Apollo has more than 237,000 items in the repository with more than 3.6m total downloads for the period October 2017-Sept 2018. Eighty-four per cent of downloads came from outside the UK. Even discounting the 1.4m downloads of the Hawking thesis, University of Cambridge theses were downloaded 790,000 times in the same period.

In 2018, the University of Cambridge topped Altmetric’s Top 100 for the institution with most mentions. The list reveals which research captured the public’s imagination over the last 12 months, with ten of the top 100 publications authored by researchers with a Cambridge affiliation.

The news of the Vice-Chancellor depositing his thesis in Apollo also comes 100 years after the University of Cambridge first began awarding PhDs to its students. More than 39,000 PhDs have been awarded and stored in the University Library archives since the establishment of the degree in May 1919.

Dr Danny Kingsley, Deputy Director Cambridge University Library, and Head of Scholarly Communication and Research Services, said: “The University of Cambridge is the first UK university to have a position statement on Open Research and this underlies our commitment to ensuring our research is robust, relevant and world-changing. Open Research directly addresses issues of reproducibility and transparency which have been of increased interest to not only our research community but to governments, funders and the citizenry worldwide over the past few years.”

“Cambridge theses are the most highly read items in our repository. They represent a significant resource where innovative and highly diverse research areas are explored in great depth. The most popular theses range across a wide variety of research areas, indicating that our theses have a broad appeal. The requests come from all points of the globe, and from people ranging from school students, to patients and professional practitioners.

Dr Danny Kingsley Dr Danny Kingsley

“The work of the Open Access team over the past four years to dramatically increase the availability of the research output of the University has been outstanding. They process approximately 1,000 deposits of Cambridge research articles a month. Combined with running the largest number of research datasets in any institutional repository in the UK and a very significant increase in the number of theses, this work means that the impactful and significant research undertaken at Cambridge is now available to the community in a way that has never been seen before.

"This is a small part of the University’s wider mission to contribute to society at the highest level of excellence.”