Explore Open Access on MUSE

Project MUSE offers open access (OA) books, journals, and digital humanities works from several distinguished university presses, scholarly societies, and independent not-for-profit academic publishers. Through our open access hosting programs, we are able to offer publishers a platform for their OA content which ensures visibility, discoverability, and wide dissemination. These materials are freely available to libraries and users around the world.


Browse All Open Access Content on MUSE


Features of Open Access content on MUSE

  • Search and browse using the same tools for all MUSE content
  • Appears in search results with content already owned by libraries
  • Requires no login or registration for access
  • DRM-free, with unlimited downloading and printing

Discover Open Access on MUSE

All open access (OA) content on MUSE is from trusted publishers with rigorous editorial guidelines, and is freely available to anyone worldwide with unlimited downloading and printing, making it ideal for teaching and research. Any library may promote these OA resources to their faculty, students, or patrons - there is no requirement to subscribe to or purchase gated content on MUSE in order to access the thousands of OA books and journal articles. Project MUSE provides the following files to assist libraries in making our OA content visible in your catalogs and library discovery systems, so your users may more easily locate and utilize these valuable, free resources.

OA Books

OA Journals

  • Open Access Journals KBART File: Download
  • Open Access Journals MARC Records Set: Download

Open Access Books on MUSE

Books are made open access on MUSE through a variety of funding initiatives, including Knowledge Unlatched, NEH Humanities Open Book grants, TOME, and individual publisher programs.

MUSE Open, an initiative supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, enables Project MUSE to distribute selected OA books in browser-native HTML5 format, with enhanced functionality. Many other books are available OA as PDF files. The publishers of the books determine the licensing terms under which the books are made available.

Books may change their status on MUSE from paid access to OA, at the request of the publisher. Some books previously sold in collections may become OA; these titles will be delivered with their original collection(s) but are no longer included in the pricing for future sales.

Use the links in the Discovery section above to download a title list, KBART file and MARC Records for the open access books:

Big Ten Open Books

Project MUSE is pleased to host the Gender and Sexuality Studies collection of open access book titles, from the Big Ten Open Books project. The project is a collaboration between the university presses and libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. The works included in the collection have all been previously published in print by partnering university presses and are now being made openly available in digital form to read and reuse at no cost. Each title has undergone a rigorous selection and quality certification process that allows readers and users of this collection to trust the veracity of the content made available. Big Ten Open Books creates ebook collections that aspire to the highest standards of discoverability, accessibility, durability, and flexibility. Learn more about Big Ten Open Books

Browse all books in the Big Ten Open Books Gender and Sexuality Studies Collection

Use the following links to download Title list, KBART file and MARC Records for the Big Ten Open Books G&SS Collection on Project MUSE:

  • Big Ten Open Books G&SS Collection Title List: Download
  • Big Ten Open Books G&SS Collection MARC Records Full Set: Download
  • Big Ten Open Books G&SS Collection KBART File: Download

Open Access Journals on MUSE

Through our Hosted Journals Program, Project MUSE offers publishers the option to host their titles on the MUSE platform under the business model of their choice, including open access. These titles benefit from all the same features, functionality, and services as every other title on the platform. We currently host several fully-OA journals through this program. Use the links above in the Discovery section to download a KBART file and MARC records for the fully-OA journals on MUSE.

Project MUSE is also currently preparing a Subscribe to Open (S2O) program around our curated Project MUSE Journal Collections, including multiple titles across a number of participating publishers. This program will launch with the 2025 calendar year subscription term. Information about the program is being released as it becomes available.

Open Access Digital Humanities on MUSE

MUSE is pleased to host content from two interactive, open access, born-digital works published in collaboration between university presses and Brown University Digital Publications at the Brown University Library. A multimodal essay "Sound and Vision" from the born-digital OA monograph Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary, published by the University of Virginia Press, was made available on the MUSE platform early in 2021. In early 2023, MUSE released a chapter titled The Web of History from A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures, published by MIT Press. The full text of both publications is available on the Brown University platform, and the excerpts on MUSE offer all the same functionality as on the primary site. Hosting content from these publications provides additional visibility and pathways to discovery for this ground-breaking scholarship, as well as spotlighting the MUSE platform's suitability for hosting robust and innovative digital humanities works.

OA Journals on MUSE

Open Access Books