(CNN) For the first time ever, influential British scientist Stephen Hawking's doctoral thesis is available to the public -- if you can get the web page to load.

In honor of Open Access Week, the University of Cambridge on Monday put the 1966 PhD thesis, " Properties of Expanding Universes ," on its open access repository. Shortly after it went live, requests to view the research crashed the website.

As of Monday afternoon, the main research page was reachable after several minutes, but nothing on the page was.

"We have had a huge response to Professor Hawking's decision to make his PhD thesis publicly available to download, with almost 60,000 downloads in less than 24 hours," spokesman Stuart Roberts said. "As a result, visitors to our open access site may find that it is performing slower than usual and may at times be temporarily unavailable."

The thesis considers the implications and consequences of the expansion of the universe. In an earlier statement , the school said it is already the most requested item in its catalog by one of the world's most recognizable scientists.

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