A vast amount of research undertaken at Cambridge is locked up in PhD theses held in paper form in the Library. Currently if a researcher wishes to look at this work they have to either attend the Library in person or contact the University and have the work scanned for a fee.

To help unlock this resource, the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) is offering to cover the cost of digitisation of PhD theses for alumni who are prepared to make their PhD freely available on the University’s repository, Apollo www.repository.cam.ac.uk. The repository currently holds over 1,000 openly accessible theses and these are some of the highest used items in the repository.

The repository is well indexed by Google and receives thousands of hits a month from all over the world. Theses placed in the repository are presented in a record and allocated a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which makes the work citable. Each record in the repository has access and download statistics and if the work is picked up by any social or broadcast media, the repository offers a service called Altmetric which tracks these mentions and will link to them from the record.

This is an opportunity for you to join other luminary alumni such as Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Professor Stephen Hawking and Lord Christopher Smith in making your PhD freely available. The process is very simple. If you wish to have your thesis digitised and made open access, please download the deposit licence agreement and once completed send a copy to thesis@repository.cam.ac.uk. 

The OSC will organise for the digitisation of your thesis and upload it to Apollo. We will send you an email when this is complete with a link to your thesis for you to share with colleagues and add to your CV. There is more information about open access and theses on the OSC website at osc.cam.ac.uk/theses/open-access-and-theses.

Got a question?

Get in touch with the team at the OSC at thesis@repository.cam.ac.uk. 

Please note we are only able to accept requests from alumni who undertook their PhD at Cambridge. If you completed your doctorate at another institution, you will need to deposit your thesis in the repository of the institution that awarded your PhD.