Oxford, OpenAI Launch Five-Year Collaboration With Bodleian Pilot
The pilot covers 3,500 public-domain dissertations dating from 1498 to 1884 and will test digitization, AI-enhanced metadata and transcription.
The University of Oxford and OpenAI launched a five-year collaboration March 4, 2025, combining a Bodleian Libraries digitization pilot with research funding and expanded access to artificial intelligence tools.
The pilot began in Feb. 2025 and covers 3,500 public-domain dissertations dating from 1498 to 1884. It will test large-scale digitization, AI-enhanced metadata, transcription and digitization workflows, with the goal of making the materials searchable and accessible to students and researchers worldwide.
The arrangement does not establish that OpenAI received unrestricted access to the Bodleian collections or that the digitized material will be used to train commercial AI models. The project focuses on digitization and research uses, and the announced terms do not specify unrestricted access to the Bodleian collections or use of the digitized material to train commercial AI models.
The project had captured about 125,000 images and created a further 429,000 digitized card files for its Global Dissertations sample. Research findings will be published through the Oxford University Research Archive.
The collaboration is part of OpenAI’s NextGenAI initiative, which committed $50 million in research grants, computing resources and API access for participating institutions. Researchers received access to OpenAI models including o1 and 4o.
“This new collaboration marks an exciting step forward, offering fresh opportunities to enrich our research, expand our AI capabilities, and foster skill development,” Anne Trefethen, Oxford’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Digital, said in the announcement.
The partnership also included plans to expand Oxford’s use of ChatGPT Edu. Access was planned for 3,000 academics and staff after an initial 500-user pilot. A later year-long pilot involved about 750 academics, research staff, postgraduate research students and professional-services staff before university-wide access was introduced during the 2025-26 academic year.
