News

Getty Publications Joins Project MUSE

(June 7, 2020) Getty Publications, the award-winning publisher affiliated with J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Research Institute and Getty Conservation Institute, has joined Project MUSE with the goal of providing academic libraries with broader and easier access to a selection of its highly regarded art and art history publications.  A selection of Getty’s e-books will become available in MUSE’s main collection starting in January 2021, marking the first time works from Getty Publications have been available through an online collection. Getty’s open access publications are also becoming available on the MUSE platform and accessible through MUSE’s new Getty Publications landing page. Several OA titles are available now and others will be added through the remainder of 2020.

“Collaborating with Project MUSE is an important next step in the dissemination of Getty work and scholarship. The last few months have made abundantly clear the importance of making content available digitally, and we are excited to be partnering with a fellow non-profit to make our online publications widely available in university libraries for the first time,” said Kara Kirk, publisher at Getty Publications. 

Getty books that will join MUSE’s main collection in 2021 include Photography’s Orientalism, the first in-depth cultural study of works by European and non-European photographers active in the Middle East and India, and Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, a standard reference in the field of manuscript studies for over twenty years.  

Among the first of Getty’s open access titles now available on MUSE is Keep It Moving, an account of twentieth-century kinetic art and its major developments in the 1950s and 1960s. Other OA titles include Ancient Terracottas from South Italy and Sicily in the J. Paul Getty Museum and Values in Heritage Management: Emerging Approaches and Research Directions. The beautifully illustrated Roman Mosaics in the J. Paul Getty Museum, which documents all the mosaics in the Museum’s collection with new color photography and detailed accounts of their discovery and excavation, will join the OA collection on MUSE before the end of the year.

“We are thrilled to have Getty Publications join MUSE at a time when visual content, particularly related to art and art history, is clearly a collection priority for our library partners,” noted Project MUSE director Wendy Queen. “We are also pleased that Getty is immediately making some exceptionally beautiful and interesting works available as part of MUSE’s growing collection of open access content.”

Getty Publications produces award-winning titles that result from or complement the work of J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Conservation Institute, and Getty Research Institute. This wide variety of books covers the fields of art, photography, archaeology, architecture, conservation, and the humanities for both the general public and specialists. Publications include illustrated works on artists and art history, exhibition catalogues, works on cultural history, research on the conservation of materials and archaeological sites, scholarly monographs, critical editions of translated works, comprehensive studies of the Getty's collections, and educational books on art to interest children of all ages.

Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community.  Since 1995, the MUSE Journal Collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide. MUSE is the trusted source of complete, full-text versions of scholarly journals from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies, with over 120 publishers currently participating. Books on Project MUSE offers access to more than 66,000 books from over 100 presses, fully integrated with MUSE's scholarly journal content for browsing and discovery.


Aarhus University Press Joins Project MUSE

(June 25, 2020) Aarhus University Press has joined Project MUSE with the goal of making available to academic libraries their full list of highly regarded books in archaeology, anthropology, arts, and many other humanities and social sciences disciplines. Both front and backlist titles from Aarhus University Press will be available as part of Project MUSE's ebook collections beginning in January 2021.

"We are thrilled to welcome Aarhus University Press to Project MUSE," says Wendy Queen, Director of Project MUSE. "With their stellar reputation in the international academic community and our shared mission to disseminate knowledge worldwide, Project MUSE is a perfect partner to help bring their outstanding academic publications to a broad global audience of scholars."

When they launch on the platform in January 2021, Aarhus University Press books will be discoverable on Project MUSE from their publisher landing page. 

Aarhus University Press is the largest university publishing house in the Nordic region, releasing 100 titles each year and with a backlist of 2000 titles, 400 of which are in English. Publication areas include anthropology, archaeology, classics, education, fine arts, history, literary studies, and science. They collaborate extensively with scholarly societies, cultural institutions, open universities, schools, and media houses for maximum outreach to academic communities around the world. Aarhus University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses).

Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community. Since 1995, the MUSE Journal Collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide. MUSE is the trusted source of complete, full- text versions of scholarly journals from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies, with over 120 publishers currently participating. Books on Project MUSE offers access to more than 67,000 books from over 100 presses, fully integrated with MUSE's scholarly journal content for browsing and discovery.


Announcing MUSE in Focus: Confronting Structural Racism

(June 5, 2020) A selection of temporarily free scholarship from Project MUSE publishers on the history of structural racism in the United States and how the country can realize anti-racist reform.

The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others at the hands of structural racism have shone a spotlight on racial violence, police brutality, and the deep systemic issues that enable it. Recent protests are calling not only for justice in individual cases of brutality, but for total reform of a system built on decades of racism and inequity. For real change to occur, it is essential to consult the deep corpus of existing evidence-based scholarship on race, history, and public policy to help chart a path toward an anti-racist future.

“MUSE in Focus: Confronting Structural Racism” is a selection of temporarily free books and articles from a wide range of publishers and perspectives about the history of racism in America, its endurance throughout society, and how the country can respond now to enact meaningful and lasting reform. We hope that this selection of research can help inform the necessary conversations and actions around this topic. 

Many of MUSE's participating publishers have temporarily made all or some of their content freely available on the Project MUSE platform, in response to the crucial need for remote access to reliable, vetted teaching and research materials during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Over 20,000 books and 200 journals, from more than 70 university presses and scholarly publishers, are currently available to any user worldwide, with no restrictions on access or usage.

"MUSE in Focus: Confronting Structural Racism" is one of a series of curated selections of trusted scholarly content from our participating publishers, designed to contribute historical, cultural, and social context to current events and issues on global, national, and local scales. Others available include "MUSE in FOCUS: Contextualizing Pandemic" and "MUSE in Focus: Addressing Gun Violence." When appropriate, we may offer additional MUSE in Focus compilations.

Project MUSE Will Freeze Journal Collection Prices for 2021

(May 27, 2020) The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted both Project MUSE’s library customers and its participating not-for-profit publishers, along with the rest of the research and education community. After a great deal of consultation with our constituents, in light of the ongoing operational and financial pressures affecting us all, we have made a decision to keep pricing for all our Project MUSE Journal Collections flat for the 2021 calendar year subscription term. There will be no increase in the annual cost for any current customer to renew for the same journal collection for 2021.

MUSE has been an integral part of the scholarly communications ecosystem for 25 years, providing libraries with affordable access to vetted, essential scholarship from our cohort of respected not-for-profit publishers. MUSE’s mission, to support the sustainable dissemination of trusted content, is aligned with those of both our library and publisher communities. By distributing the significant majority of our revenue from library subscriptions directly back to our university-based publishers, we return a great deal of value to the system of scholarship, rather than extracting it. We invest in maintaining a collaborative platform that provides for crucial needs of discoverability and accessibility, complies with major information standards, and offers library-friendly and user-friendly terms.

“Positioned as we are within our home at the Johns Hopkins University Press, Project MUSE has a keen insight on the shared challenges our community faces. Many are grappling with a rapid transition to online and hybrid learning environments and significant disruptions to our usual operations,” said Wendy Queen, Director, Project MUSE. “Our platform was ready for the transition and continues to provide essential support for research and teaching worldwide. We want to ensure our core humanities and social science resources remain available to all who count on them.”

Over the next several weeks, we will be in direct contact with our current consortium partners and library subscribers to confirm renewal information for the coming year. All MUSE subscriptions operate on a calendar year term, with a December 31 expiration date. We hope that announcing this pricing decision as early as possible will assist customers with future planning.

One of the consequences of the decision to keep collection prices flat for 2021 is that Project MUSE will not be able to incorporate new titles into its journal collections, only replace for attrition as applicable. Any changes to the collection content for 2021 will be announced later this summer, as details are confirmed. In recent years MUSE has grown its options for hosting journals on the platform outside its collections, both as open access and for individual title subscriptions, and we do expect to take on additional hosted titles over the next year.

We understand that even with holding our prices flat for 2021, some customers may wish to evaluate their best options for retaining maximum access to content on MUSE within their particular budgetary constraints. Project MUSE offers a number of Journal Collection options and is always happy to assist libraries with a usage analysis to determine the best fit for their needs and available funds. Please contact MUSE Sales Support  with any questions or concerns.

Project MUSE announces "MUSE In Focus: Contextualizing Pandemic"

(April 21, 2020) As the modern world faces an unprecedented crisis in the COVID-19 pandemic, it is difficult to put into context each day’s events and how they will reverberate for years to come. Over the last few weeks, Project MUSE has been working closely with participating non-profit publishers who have graciously offered to make their scholarly content temporarily available for free on our platform. We are amazed at the depth and breadth of interdisciplinary content that is now free to read for anyone who visits Project MUSE.

"MUSE in Focus: Contextualizing Pandemic" is a small sampling of temporarily free scholarship from Project MUSE publishers on the broad topic of pandemic and its effects throughout history, in culture, and on humanity as a whole. We hope that bringing these pieces together will help to bring historical and cultural context to the current crisis, so that we may look to the knowledge of the past to guide us forward.

We envision this cross section as a place for scholars and generally interested readers alike to begin learning more. We also encourage readers to explore Project MUSE for additional relevant content.

More than 80 of MUSE's participating publishers have temporarily made all or some of their content freely available on the Project MUSE platform, in response to the crucial need for remote access to reliable, vetted teaching and research materials during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Over 25,000 books and 300 journals are now available to any user worldwide, with no restrictions on access or usage. MUSE has also made available tools to help libraries with discovery of the free resources.

"MUSE in Focus: Contextualizing Pandemic" follows on the August 2019 release of "MUSE in Focus: Addressing Gun Violence," a selection of scholarship from Project MUSE publishers on gun violence, its effect throughout the culture, and its possible solutions, developed to inform policymakers and educate researchers and other concerned citizens. When appropriate, we may offer additional MUSE in Focus compilations, where trusted scholarly content from our participating publishers may contribute historical, cultural, and social context to current events and issues on global, national, and local scales.

Over 50 Publishers Offering Free Content on MUSE, Discovery Tools Now Available

(March 26, 2020) - 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.

Publishers Provide Scholarly Content Free on Project MUSE During COVID-19 Crisis

(March 18, 2020) In response to the challenges created by the global public health crisis of COVID-19, Project MUSE is pleased to support its participating publishers in making scholarly content temporarily available for free on our platform. With many higher education institutions moving into an exclusively online learning environment for the foreseeable future, we hope that easy access to vetted research in the humanities and social sciences, from a variety of distinguished university presses, societies, and related not-for-profit publishers, will help to support teaching, learning, and knowledge discovery for users worldwide.

Among the publishers currently opting to make content free on Project MUSE are Johns Hopkins University Press (all books and journals), Ohio State University Press (all books and journals), University of Nebraska Press (all books and journals), University of North Carolina Press (all books), Temple University Press (all books), and Vanderbilt University Press (selected books). We expect to announce additional participants and will continually update the list of publishers offering free access to content.

“These are turbulent and challenging times. Above all, we are committed to ensuring that students and researchers around the world can access information from our books and journals easily,” said Donna Shear, Director, University of Nebraska Press. “Enabling this through making our content on Project MUSE open for the next few months is one important way to do that.”

“The COVID-19 pandemic presents an unprecedented challenge to the global scholarly ecosystem and its institutions. This move is our way of helping to ease theburden on students and instructors so that they can continue research and coursework as smoothly as possible, as well as to honor the work of our authors in making their research available when the world needs nuanced and rigorous scholarship the most,” said Tony Sanfilippo, Director, Ohio State University Press Director.

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 associatewith 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.

“Serving the needs of libraries, publishers, and scholars has been core to the MUSE mission since day one,” said Wendy Queen, Director, Project MUSE. “The global COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in enormous and rapid changes to the lives of all our constituents, with the need to adapt daily to new methods of communicating and working. MUSE is grateful for the opportunity to support our community through this crisis, as a hub to connect users and the content they need, wherever they can.”

“This is an extraordinary moment. Pedagogy and research are sprinting swiftly to online platforms, while at the same time, we’re devolving into an increasingly unstable economic environment,” said John Sherer, Director, University of North Carolina Press. “Nevertheless, we at UNC Press are compelled to remove the paywalls from the scholarship that we have in platforms like Project MUSE. My hope is that by making it easy and inexpensive to utilize these resources now, libraries, students, teachers, and administrators will realize the enormous value in these kinds of collections. And, when the current crisis has passed, they will dedicate the resources needed to support them.”

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 areavailable as we transition to a remote work environment, and we encourage communicating any concerns or questions to Customer Support.

COVID-19: A message for our customers

(March 16, 2020) Amid ongoing concern about COVID-19, Project MUSE’s top priority is the health and safety of our employees. We are all currently doing well, and we very much hope you are too. We understand the concern and uncertainty you may be experiencing around this evolving situation, and we want to assure you that we are committed to being responsive to all of our customers' needs.

  • Project MUSE does not anticipate any significant disruption in service to our users. We will communicate any unexpected disruptions via website and/or email.

  • Continuity plans are in action to guarantee that work may continue and MUSE staff is available for communication from customers as we transition to a remote (work-from-home) environment. Although our phone lines are covered, emailing customer support is the most efficient way to communicate at this time.
  • We are urging all universities and institutions to educate users on how to access library resources like MUSE from offsite locations. MUSE supports remote access via options including Shibboleth, referring URL, and secure proxy.

  • Customers needing to update or add to their remote access options can do so easily and efficiently through our Library Dashboard. If you do not already have access to the dashboard, you can create a new account.

Project MUSE hosts over 2000 open access books and a small number of fully open access journals, all from distinguished not-for-profit scholarly publishers, and we hope that this content can be useful to students and researchers wherever they may be working at this time. To increase discoverability of the OA books, we make available free MARC records and KBART files, and we have also worked with major knowledge bases to ensure libraries can easily activate our full collection of OA titles via their discovery services. Here are the collection names for OA books on MUSE:

  • EBSCO Discovery Service: Project Muse Open Access ebooks

  • OCLC: Project Muse Open Access Books (OCLC collection ID project_muse_726)

  • Ex Libris 360 KnowledgeBase: Project MUSE - Open Access Books

  • Ex Libris SFX KnowledgeBases: PROJECT_MUSE_OPEN_ACCESS_BOOKS

We will be in touch with more information as needed, and encourage you to contact us with any questions or concerns. In the meantime, we wish you and your loved ones health and safety during this challenging time.

All New 2020 MUSE Collection Journals Now Available

Project MUSE is pleased to announce that content is now available on our platform from all of the journals joining our collections in 2020. The newly-added titles bring the total number of distinguished humanities and social science journals contributing current issues to the MUSE collections to 598.


Kenyon Review, Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships, Mexican Studies, Christianity & Literature, and Narrative Culture are just a sampling of the new journals. A recent policy change encourages titles to contribute back volumes when joining MUSE, allowing content to become available on the platforem even if a journal has not yet published an issues for the 2020 calendar year. Most of the new titles are offering at least two previous volumes in addition to any recently released issues.


Two newly-added titles, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, and US Latino & Latina Oral History Journal, launch on MUSE with a complete run from Volume 1, Number 1, to present. More than 170 journals now offer a complete run on the MUSE platform.


All titles join the Premium Collection, MUSE's most comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journals. Several of the new journals are also available for single title subscriptions on MUSE.


View all the newly-added 2020 MUSE collection journals or See updates and changes for all MUSE Journal Collections for 2020.


MUSE announces 2020 books collections, new publishers

Pricing and other details are now available for all of Project MUSE’s 2020 book collections. By the end of the 2020 calendar year, MUSE will host over 63,000 titles from more than 120 distinguished not-for-profit publishers from around the world. Our 2020 Complete collection will offer nearly 3,000 newly-published humanities and social science titles from our expanding group of university presses, scholarly societies, academic centers, and related global publisher participants.

All books on MUSE are DRM-free, with unlimited simultaneous use, downloading, and printing. Book content is fully integrated for searching and browsing alongside content from more than 650 scholarly journals published by our not-for-profit partners. Recently-announced additions to the list of publishers making their books available on the Project MUSE platform include Harvard University Asia Center Publications Program, Presses de l'Université Laval, University of Rochester Press, and University of Tampa Press.

 

Books on MUSE are available in collections by subject and by publication date. In addition to the annual Complete collection, including all the new books released in the MUSE collections for the year, subject- and area-studies-specific options include Global Cultural Studies, Literature, Political Science and Policy Studies, Asian and Pacific Studies, Philosophy and Religion, Middle Eastern Studies, Public Health and Health Policy, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies, among many others.

 

Many of the books on MUSE are also available for single-title purchase, via our channel partners GOBI and OASIS. In addition, MUSE offers Evidence-Based Acquisition programs for books on our platform. Over 1,200 open access books, from both traditional and OA-only scholarly publishers, are also now available on MUSE.

 

For more information on Project MUSE book collections available to your institution, visit the For Librarians section of our web site. To request pricing for MUSE book products, complete our price quote form or contact MUSE Sales for more information.



New journals confirmed to join MUSE collections in 2020

Project MUSE is pleased to announce that the following journals have been confirmed to join our journals collection in 2020. All titles will be added to the MUSE Journals Premium Collection.

  • Acta Classica
  • Antipodes
  • Christianity and Literature
  • Edith Wharton Review
  • Hitchcock Annual
  • Journal of Arizona History
  • Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships
  • Journal of Comparative Family Studies
  • Journal of the Turkish and Ottoman Studies Association
  • Kenyon Review
  • Mexican Studies
  • Mississippi Quarterly
  • Narrative Culture
  • Nova Religio
  • The Public Historian
  • The Review of Metaphysics
  • Studies in Romanticism
  • US Latino & Latina Oral History

No further titles are expected to be added for 2020. See more details on the new titles, as well as other changes to the MUSE Journal Collections for 2020.

Please see the applicable Products page in our For Librarians section for information on the Project MUSE Journal Collections available to your library.


Project MUSE announces free access to gun violence scholarship

Project MUSE is temporarily providing free access to more than a dozen journal articles and books focused on understanding and preventing gun violence. The goal is to encourage the broadest possible engagement with current research and expertise on the topic as the latest round of gun policy debates and discussions continue in the wake of shootings in California, Texas, and Ohio. The selected content has been collected as “MUSE in Focus: Addressing Gun Violence."

"We wanted to work quickly to assemble this material," said Project MUSE director Wendy Queen. "While MUSE content is available to millions of researchers worldwide through their subscribing institutions, it was important to us that this work be made available to everyone."

The material was selected by the Project MUSE staff in consultation with publishers to provide a broad range of perspectives and expertise relevant to the policy debates that are inevitably renewed with each new incident of gun violence. Participating publishers include Johns Hopkins University Press, Michigan State University Press, Penn State University Press, University of Massachusetts Press, University of Michigan Press, University of North Carolina Press, and University of Pennsylvania Press. The collection features titles such as Private Guns, Public Health, by David Hemenway, and After Gun Violence: Deliberation and Memory in an Age of Political Gridlock, by Craig Rood.

Also included is the contributed work, Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis, edited by Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick, which JHU Press director Barbara Kline Pope decided to make available as an open access book in 2017 after the mass shooting in Las Vegas. She had joined the Press only several weeks before that incident. Information about the book’s free availability has been shared repeatedly after subsequent shootings.

"It’s enormously sad— it’s astonishing, frankly—that this is the fourth time in less than two years at JHU Press that I have been part of an effort to make material like this available to the public in the wake of horrific gun violence," commented Pope. "It’s tremendously important that the voices of experts and the insights of years of relevant research have full weight in the discussion of gun policy by lawmakers, journalists, and the public. Lives literally depend on understanding that research-based solutions and consensus are possible."


Over 36,000 Books on MUSE Now Available in OASIS Platform

More than 36,000 ebooks from Project MUSE, focused on humanities and social sciences, are now available for title-by-title purchase in the OASIS platform. MUSE books are all digital rights management (DRM)-free, with unlimited simultaneous usage and no download, print, or copy/paste restrictions.

Project MUSE disseminates scholarly books and journals from hundreds of the world's most distinguished university presses and scholarly societies. MUSE is the latest "publisher-direct" platform to be added to OASIS, the configurable web-based ordering tool used by academic librarians to select and order print books, ebooks, and streaming video.

"MUSE is pleased to offer libraries a new channel for purchasing books on our platform via an established service provider with whom we share many mutual customers," said Wendy Queen, Director of Project MUSE. "We recognize that libraries have individualized acquistion strategies for ebooks and want to support tools which integrate with their preferred processes and best meet their needs for adding our books to their collections."

"ProQuest continues to invest in OASIS," said Audrey Marcus. Vice President, Book Product & Operations. The addition of Project MUSE as our newest publisher-direct platform gives librarians convenient access to quality humanities and social science content from this trusted resource."

Libraries interested in ordering Project MUSE books via OASIS should contact their ProQuest sales representative for set-up instructions.


New Participating Publishers for MUSE Book Collections, 2019 Pricing Available

Project MUSE is pleased to welcome four additional publishers contributing titles to our Book Collections on MUSE for 2019. Arc Humanities Press, Harvard University Asia Center Publications Program, University of Missouri/Missouri Review Books, and University of Tampa Press books will be available on the MUSE platform starting next year, joining nearly 58,000 titles from more than 100 distinguished university presses and related scholarly publishers in the humanities and social sciences.

Updated pricing for all MUSE Book Collections, including new collections of forthcoming 2019 titles, is now available. All book content on MUSE is DRM-free, with unlimited simultaneous usage, downloading, and printing. Books are highly discoverable through MUSE’s relationships with indexing and discovery services, include free MARC records and COUNTER-compliant usage statistics, and are fully integrated for searching and browsing alongside the content from more than 650 scholarly journals on the platform.

MUSE Book Collections are available across a wide array of subjects in including literature, history, political science and policy studies, philosophy and religion, performing arts, and public health, among others. Area studies collections including African Studies, Asian and Pacific Studies, Native and Indigenous Studies, and several others are also available. Libraries may select collections by publication year, with volume-based discounts offered for purchases incorporating several years of backlist titles.

In the summer of 2018, Project MUSE released a newly redesigned platform offering a more robust user experience, with an elegantly intuitive interface and a suite of tools focused on the researcher. Among the exciting features available in the new design are content footnotes and references presented “in-line” with the associated text in a journal article or book chapter, a streamlined search experience with a new facet for book series, a highly responsive mobile-friendly design, and the launch of “MyMUSE” accounts that allow users to create a personal library and customize their research experience on MUSE.

Additional information about Books on MUSE is available in the For Librarians section of our site. Interested libraries may submit the price request form on our web site or contact our sales office for a quote.


Project MUSE offers nearly 300 "HTML5" open access books on redesigned platform

More searchable and discoverable than PDFs, the improved new format represents the “next chapter” in OA publishing in the humanities and social sciences

Nearly 300 open access (OA) books are now available from Project MUSE, the highly-acclaimed online collection of humanities and social science scholarship, on a newly designed platform that represents a major step forward in OA publishing in these fields. The books will be delivered in a highly-discoverable and adaptable format using user-friendly HTML5, rather than static PDFs, and will include titles from Johns Hopkins University Press, Cornell University Press, Duke University Press, University of Hawai'i Press, University of Michigan Press, Syracuse University Press, The MIT Press, and Temple University Press. "This really represents the next chapter in OA publishing for MUSE and our university press collaborators," said Wendy Queen, Director of Project MUSE, "and we’re thrilled to have so many important works available open access on MUSE in such a flexible, useful format. Thanks to the 'MUSE Open' grant from the Mellon Foundation these titles are now available on a much improved MUSE platform and available for free to readers worldwide."

The new "HTML5 OA" titles greatly enhance a collection of almost 600 OA books in PDF format that were already available on MUSE, bringing the total of OA books to over 800. MUSE plans to add more HTML5 OA books each year. The initiative was made possible by a two-year grant of nearly $1 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which concluded this summer. Funds were used to develop an open source workflow for transforming epub files into HTML5 and, most importantly for users, launch a scholar-informed redesign of the Project MUSE interface that emphasizes simplicity, accessibility, and personalization. The redesigned platform includes robust support for discovery and linking, along with preservation with trusted third parties, assuring wide dissemination of OA book content on MUSE. The platform's enhanced analytics services will help publishers understand the impact of making books freely available.

"Books that are open to the world have the power to transform the discovery of new knowledge and impact evidence-based decisions and the ways in which people learn," said Barbara Kline Pope, Director of the Johns Hopkins University Press. "Supported by the generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, the innovations implemented on the Project MUSE platform are just the first step in facilitating breakthrough knowledge acquisition."

"When making a Temple University Press book available in open access, our primary goal is that it be discovered and used by as many people as possible – and partnering with MUSE ensures we achieve this," said Mary Rose Muccie, Director, Temple University Press. "MUSE's reputation and global reach, as well as the discoverability features within the MUSE platform, will bring these titles to the attention of scholars, students, and the general public worldwide. We're especially excited to have the historically significant, and formerly out of print, labor studies books funded by our NEH Humanities Open Book Program grant available on MUSE, where they can inform new scholarship in the field."

Project MUSE anticipates hosting hundreds more OA scholarly books, funded through initiatives including the NEH Humanities Open Book program, Knowledge Unlatched, TOME, Mellon grants, and other publisher- and institution-driven programs. Open access content on MUSE is fully integrated and supported alongside the more than 54,000 books and over 650 scholarly journal titles also on the platform. MUSE welcomes inquiries from publishers and other content creators with scholarship they wish to make freely available, with wide reach and rich options for discovery, linking, and transformative impact.


New Journals Coming in 2019

Project MUSE is pleased to announce that the following journals have been confirmed to join MUSE in 2019. All new journals will be added to the MUSE Journals Premium Collection.

  • Antisemitism Studies
  • Asian Perspective
  • The Catholic Biblical Quarterly
  • Dickens Studies Annual
  • The Faulkner Journal
  • Historical Geography
  • Journal of Caribbean History
  • Journal of Chinese Religions
  • Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies
  • Journal of Magazine Media
  • The Latin Americanist
  • New York History
  • Old Testament Abstracts
  • Rhetoric of Health & Medicine
  • Topia

Please see the applicable Products page in our For Librarians section for information on the Project MUSE Journal Collections available to your library.


Project MUSE Releases Newly Redesigned Web Presence

Project MUSE’s newly redesigned website is now live at https://muse.jhu.edu. With a scholar-informed design and enhanced technological infrastructure, the new site offers a more robust user experience for all of the scholarship on MUSE, with an elegantly intuitive interface and a suite of tools focused on the researcher.

Extensive user testing during the development of the new site revealed desires for simplicity, consistency, and more personalized interactions with Project MUSE’s book and journal content. Among the exciting features available in the new design are content footnotes and references presented “in-line” with the associated text in a journal article or books chapter, a streamlined search experience with additional facets for book series and thematic journal issues, a highly responsive design to meet a variety of device options, and the launch of personalized “MyMUSE” accounts that allow users customize their research experience on MUSE.

   Personalized MUSE Accounts

Users who create a MyMUSE account may save and view prior searches, build a personal library of their favorite MUSE materials (books, chapters, journals, issues, or articles), generate citations for all or selected items in their library, search within their personal library, and view their activity history on MUSE. With an account, a user may also set up alerts for their favorite journals, publishers, and subjects on MUSE, and choose to receive the alerts via email or RSS, or see them in an attractive dashboard format on the site. Accessibility was a prime consideration in the new platform design, and users may set preferences in their account to customize the interface for optimal accessibility.

   How This Affects You

The new Project MUSE website is a redesign and re-engineering of MUSE’s proprietary platform. The URL structure for all book and journal content in MUSE will remain the same and there will be no need for redirects or updates to DOI links, no impact on institutional usage statistics, nor any need to update proxy configurations. Shortly, MUSE will also be launching new portals for publishers and libraries featuring powerful tools help them more efficiently manage their relationships with us. More details on these portals will be shared with our customers and partners as they are released.

As we continue to roll out additional content and features, we expect users, customers, and business partners exploring the new Project MUSE site may have questions or comments they wish to share. In the footer of every page there is a link for Feedback, and we encourage use of this to contact us with any feedback or concerns. In particular, please use the Feedback form to report any errors or issues with the new site, as this will ensure they are promptly placed in our queue to address.


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