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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 OA content on MUSE

OA 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 following links to download Title list, KBART file and MARC Records for the open access books:

OA 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