Project MUSE Launches Initiative for Broad Expansion of Latin American University Press Books
By Project MUSE
Project MUSE is pleased to announce a new initiative to greatly expand the Spanish and Portuguese language book content on our platform, via partnerships with a large number of distinguished university presses from Latin America. Much of the current output from these presses is not easily available to libraries digitally in unlimited-use models, and MUSE hopes to help the publishers significantly expand their global reach through our variety of library acquisition options.
MUSE currently hosts nearly 1,000 Spanish language titles, which have been accessed across 300 institutions in 44 countries. Since 2020, sales of Spanish-language books on the platform have doubled, revealing an unmet, worldwide demand for this content. MUSE is well positioned to assist Latin American university press publishers in overcoming logistical and systemic barriers to wider distribution of their titles. Globally elevating the visibility of this important scholarship is central to MUSE’s commitment to equity, inclusion, and diversity.
To help reach a broad group of university press publishers from the region, MUSE engaged with EULAC, the Association of University Presses of Latin America and the Caribbean, which represents over 350 university presses across Latin America. EULAC has facilitated outreach and conversations with many of the association’s members, helping to spread the word about this initiative.
In order to support as many publishers as possible, MUSE has signed agreements with two major distribution partners in Latin America to facilitate easy and efficient ingestion of book content, and ensure robust metadata for maximum discoverability. The distributors, Hipertexto-Netizen and Siglo, each serve a significant number of publishers for distribution of their digital files and metadata, and working with both vendors allows publishers to choose the preferred channel for supplying their titles to MUSE. To date, MUSE has made agreements with over 75 publishers, who will begin contributing titles shortly. Download a list of participating publishers (.xls).
“EULAC’s mission is the encouragement and promotion of academic thought and editorial production from our region,” says Sayri Karp, President of EULAC. “University press publishers have a great opportunity to take the bridge of Hipertexto-Netizen and Siglo to join other important publishers on Project MUSE to bring prestige, visibility, and sales to their books.”
“Libraries have expressed challenges to finding recently published Spanish language books,” explains Kelley Squazzo, Director of Library & Publisher Partnerships, Project MUSE. “We are very glad to be able to fill a market need and at the same time support and elevate the important work published by university presses in Latin America.”
MUSE is grateful to our many partners in this endeavor, and we believe this networked approach will help us to bring a critical mass of new and recent backlist books to the platform quickly and efficiently, making them available to library purchasers worldwide through our DRM-free purchase models. MUSE also thanks the members of SALALM, the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials, for their helpful guidance in developing this initiative. Over the coming months, we hope to expand our content to well over a hundred publishers across the Spanish- and Portuguese- speaking world, bringing thousands of new titles to audiences that had previously been out of reach via existing distribution channels.
Further announcements will be forthcoming as additional publishers sign on to participate, and books from this initiative become available on the MUSE platform.
About Project MUSE
Project MUSE has offered libraries affordable access to essential humanities and social science research for nearly 30 years, as an integral part of the scholarly communications ecosystem and platform of choice for respected not-for-profit publishers. Currently, Project MUSE is the trusted and reliable source for more than 800 journals and more than 90,000 books, from nearly 400 of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies. MUSE also hosts thousands of open access books and several open access journal titles, freely available to anyone worldwide.
