The MUSE Story

At Project MUSE, we believe that knowledge has the power to enrich lives and that a sustainable scholarly ecosystem is essential for advancing humanity. 

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. We collaborate with hundreds of mission-driven publishers to curate quality scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. We make this groundbreaking scholarship available to libraries, so people can use it to unearth discoveries of their own. 

Currently, we host more than 800 journals and over 100,000 books from some 400 leading university presses, scholarly societies, and related publishers. Books and journals are fully integrated on our robust and accessible scholar-designed platform, with a wide variety of affordable library acquisition options available. The Project MUSE platform also offers more than 6,000 open access books and several open access journals on the platform.

Features of Project MUSE

Our easy-to-use platform, with a single access point, is enhanced for ultimate discoverability, so users can quickly find what they are looking for to enhance their research. We aggregate high-quality, peer-reviewed books and journals from university presses and nonprofit publishers. The features of our platform include: 

  • 100% full text
  • No embargoes on content
  • Current scholarly Humanities and Social Sciences content
  • Unlimited usage, printing, and downloading
  • Search books & journals on a single platform
  • Mobile friendly
  • Compliant with US and international accessibility standards

Our Mission

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 Hopkins Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower LIbrary, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.

Our Brand Pillars

Discoverability Powers Knowledge

Our charge is to sustain the scholarly publishing ecosystem and grow our collective knowledge. We prioritize evidence-based, peer-reviewed scholarship developed through close collaboration between scholars and mission-driven publishers. Enhancing the discoverability of high-quality scholarship in the world is the first step to making it a better, more curious place. 

Interdisciplinary Research for an Intersectional World

Crossing disciplines to strengthen ideas is crucial to unraveling the complexity of our world. Discoveries in humanities and social sciences directly influence developments in other fields, emphasizing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach. Our wide-ranging scholarship helps people address society’s most pressing challenges from new angles.

Evolving for Our Community

The world of publishing is constantly advancing—and so are we. We adapt our platform, hosting, and licensing options so MUSE and our partners can best serve publishers and institutions. Our business model sustains our publishers while keeping our products affordable for libraries. The future of the nonprofit scholarly community depends on it.

By Scholars, For Scholars

We were founded by Johns Hopkins University Press on the belief that scholarly discourse has the power to advance humanity. We’re passionate about continuous collaboration with publishers and libraries to ensure that everyone has access to dependable research—and can use it as they unearth new discoveries. Together, we help scholarly works have a place in the world, so they can change the world.


Our History

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.


An Essential Resource

The Project MUSE platform is an essential resource that makes high-quality scholarship from nonprofit publishers easily accessible to librarires and institutions and the researchers they serve.  We connect scholars and institutions to quality books and journals on our industry-leading platform because we believe that knowledge is essential to enriching lives and advancing discoveries.

When using Project MUSE, you can expect: 

High quality, peer-reviewed, stable content

  • Content written by the most prestigious authors and scholars in their fields
  • Books and journals from non-profit scholarly publishers, including university presses and societies
  • Once content goes online in MUSE, it stays online, permanently

Designed by the academic community, for the academic community

  • Founded as a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers
  • Affordable tiered pricing structure enables libraries to customize their offering
  • License designed with library needs in mind

User-friendly platform for research and discovery

  • Search books and journals in one place and at the same time
  • Linking relationships with indexing/abstracting/search services facilitate access to MUSE content
  • Alerts and social networking options for sharing discoveries with colleagues
  • Free access to book and journal Tables of Contents and sample full-text journal articles and book chapters without a subscription
  • Offering OA content that will be broadly shared, widely discoverable and richly linked