Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community around the world.
For nearly 30 years, Project MUSE has been the trusted and reliable source for access to essential humanities and social science research, as an integral part of the scholarly communications ecosystem and platform of choice for respected not-for-profit publishers. Currently, Project MUSE hosts more than 800 journals and nearly 100,000 books from some 400 leading university presses, scholarly societies, and related publishers. Books and journals are fully integrated on Project MUSE's robust and accessible scholar-designed platform, with a wide variety of affordable library acquisition options available. MUSE also offers more than 5,000 open access books and several open access journals on the platform.
Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.
Project MUSE debuted in 1995 as a collaboration between the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University, the first of its kind in scholarly humanities publishing. Grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed Project MUSE to go live with Johns Hopkins University Press journals in 1995. In 2000, Project MUSE expanded by inviting other scholarly presses and journals to benefit from this successful publishing initiative, cementing Project MUSE's role as a leading provider of online journals in the humanities and social sciences. Then in 2011, Project MUSE partnered with the University Press e-Book Consortium to establish the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC) Book Collections on Project MUSE. With a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2016, Project MUSE developed MUSE Open with the goal of distributing OA monographs on the Project MUSE platform to be broadly shared, widely discoverable, and richly linked.
In 2020, Project MUSE celebrated its 25th anniversary, including the creation of a special website featuring a timeline, 25 MUSE makers, and a celebratory video. Experience these memories with us: https://muse.jhu.edu/25/
More recently and in 2021, Project MUSE received a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Public Knowledge Program to study the innovative business model for open access journal publishing known as "Subscribe to Open."
Today, Project MUSE is still a not-for-profit collaboration with the goal of disseminating quality scholarship via a sustainable model that meets the needs of both libraries and publishers around the world.
