org.hibernate.HibernateException: Error accessing stax stream

Couple of things you should check: 

• If you are using Eclipse IDE make sure that it is not giving you any error indicators for hibernate.cfg.xml file. 
• Make sure to close the tag <hibernate-configuration>
• Missing !character in the DOCTYPE
• Not able to accesshibernate-configuration-3.0.dtd from the url provided.
• Space before <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>