Over 50 Publishers Offering Free Content on MUSE, Discovery Tools Now Available
By Project MUSE
In the past week, Project MUSE has partnered with the community of not-for-profit scholarly presses providing journals and books on our platform to offer significant amounts of that content for free. More than 50 publishers have chosen to temporarily make content freely available to assist with access for the many students, faculty, and researchers now working remotely due to the global public health crisis of COVID-19. As of today, more than 15,000 books, and over 230 journal titles - comprising well over 10,000 issues and more than 185,000 articles - are available through this initiative. See more details on the content and the full list of participating publishers, which is being updated continuously.
To assist libraries with making the temporarily-free books and journals easily discoverable by users, we have created collections and associated metadata files for the content, and shared this information with the major discovery system knowledge bases, who are incorporating it into their systems now. The files are by resource type (book/journal), and will be continuously updated as additional content is made available. Download MARC records, KBART files, or title lists from our web page, or look for the collections to activate them in your preferred discovery system.
Content that is freely available on the Project MUSE platform during the COVID-19 crisis will display a distinctive "Free" icon, different from the "OA" icon used for fully open access content on MUSE, or the familiar green checkmark that users associate with content held by their library. MUSE search results, by default, include any content to which a user has access, so will offer the researcher any relevant free, OA, or entitled articles and books. There are over 2000 open access books and a small number of fully OA journals on the MUSE platform. Project MUSE is committed to creating products that are fully accessible to all users, with information about our accessibility practices and a current VPAT available on our site.
Project MUSE has a robust continuity plan in place and does not anticipate any significant disruption to our service as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. MUSE staff are available from our current remote work environment, and we encourage communicating any questions or concerns to Customer Support.
