General Overview

"The wide subject range is appropriate to undergraduates as well as grads and faculty at liberal arts institutions. Easy to search... a great resource." -- Lisa N. Johnston, Sweet Briar College

"A precedent-setting venture in scholarly electronic publishing with consistently high performance and reliability." -- Peter V. Deekle, Wheaton College

What is Project MUSE®?

Project MUSE is a unique collaboration between libraries and publishers providing 100% full-text, affordable and user-friendly online access to over 380 high quality humanities and social sciences journals from over 60 scholarly publishers.

MUSE began in 1993 as a pioneering joint project of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at JHU. Grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed MUSE to go live with JHU Press journals in 1995. Journals from other publishers were first incorporated in 2000, with additional university press and scholarly society publishers joining in each subsequent year.

Today, MUSE is still a not-for-profit collaboration between the participating publishers and MSEL, with the goal of disseminating quality scholarship via a sustainable model that meets the needs of both libraries and publishers. At this time, Project MUSE subscriptions are available only to institutions.

Why choose Project MUSE?

High quality journals, collections for every need.
The Project MUSE® complete collection offers a comprehensive selection of prestigious humanities and social sciences journals to support a core liberal arts curriculum at any academic institution. Every journal is heavily indexed and peer-reviewed, with critically acclaimed articles by the most respected scholars in their fields. MUSE is also the sole source of complete, full-text versions of titles from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies.

For research libraries, MUSE provides an affordable selection of top-tier, heavily indexed, and widely held journals. For undergraduate libraries, we combine the most widely held, heavily used, core general education titles. Humanities and social sciences collections allow libraries with specialized needs to acquire a set of key journals. In addition, MUSE collections are a very economical and effective information literacy tool for secondary schools and community colleges.

Complete journal content and a stable archive.
The complete content of each and every issue is online—including all charts, graphics and images—with articles available in HTML, PDF, or both formats. To supplement current issues, MUSE subscribers have free access to a decade of backfiles for selected titles. And, the MUSE version is typically online before the print version hits the streets.

It is a MUSE policy that once content goes online, it stays online. As the back issues of journals increase annually, they remain electronically archived and accessible. We also have a permanent archiving and preservation strategy, including participation in LOCKSS, maintenance of several off-site mirror servers, and deposition of MUSE content into third-party archives. Subscribers "own" MUSE content, even if they don't renew their subscription. Paid-for content may be downloaded or provided on disk at no charge.

A unique library-publisher partnership, designed to meet libraries' needs.
As a collaboration between the participating publishers and JHU libraries, MUSE understands the unique needs and challenges of today's scholarly publishing environment. The MUSE staff includes professional librarians with experience in user services, tech services, reference and bibliographic services. They use this knowledge and experience to develop MUSE into the most affordable, accessible online tool possible.

The MUSE license allows unlimited access, interlibrary loan, content usage for e-reserves and includes remote users. Article-level URLs are stable, allowing for direct linking from online syllabi and electronic reading lists. We provide COUNTER-compliant statistics so that libraries can evaluate their use of MUSE. MUSE usability experts continually refine interface and navigation, and we provide both a basic and an advanced search interface. Many popular indexing/abstracting services and e-journal gateways, as well as JSTOR, are seamlessly linked to MUSE content. Easy-to-use subject guides and other instructional materials are available free of charge to subscribing libraries.

For complete details on the features that make Project MUSE a powerful yet easy-to-use research tool, please see our Features and Functionality page.

See For Yourself

Not yet subscribed? Feel free to take a look around the Project MUSE Website. Tables of contents and sample full text articles can be viewed without a subscription, and our search feature is publicly available. Qualifying institutions may also request a complimentary 45-day trial subscription. Please e-mail us if you have any questions.

About The Johns Hopkins University Press

Project MUSE is managed by the Johns Hopkins University Press, in collaboration with the participating publishers and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at the Johns Hopkins University, to offer the full text of JHUP scholarly journals via the Web. In 1999, MUSE expanded to become a unique partnership of not-for-profit publishers, increasing its ability to offer essential periodicals in the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences. Project MUSE has been hailed for its library-friendly licensing and usage policies, easy online navigation, reasonable pricing, and generous discount plans for consortia and various categories of libraries.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is one of the country's oldest and largest university presses, publishing more than 200 books each year and 58 scholarly journals. By long tradition the Press has published with distinction in such disciplines as literary studies, classics, history, economics, political science, and the history of science and medicine. Its innovative publishing program embraces both traditional and newer modes of scholarly communication.