Supporting Digital Scholarship

“The idea for putting journals online emerged at a time when people were talking a lot about electronic publishing; personal computers were still just desktop tools for things like word processing, spread sheets, and email. The World Wide Web was just coming into being—most of us had never heard of it when we first started talking about e-publishing. It was also a time when both publishers and librarians had growing budgetary concerns. Costs were skyrocketing for libraries, especially for science journals from commercial publishers who were charging exorbitant prices.  This strained library budgets, and we were seeing subscription cancellations at the same time as experiencing high print costs.  So the ability to access journals on a computer seemed like a very good idea—convenient, cost efficient, space saving, all sorts of benefits. It was just a really cool, very exciting possibility. 

“A lot of things came together for MUSE with the right people at the right time; a perfect storm—in a good way! The people in the Hopkins library were a critical contributor to our success.  They helped us with technical knowledge, contacts, and influence in the library world. They helped us figure out how MUSE would work, what it would look like, and what it would be.  There were technical issues to address such as how to catalog and reference, page numbers, footnotes, citations, key words. How to code for these. Most important was how to index journals so that a user could search on key words or subjects, as this would be a key benefit to an online journal in addition to ease of you and ability to access from any computer. So, our team, spearheaded by Sue Lewis on the Press’s side and Todd Kelly on the Library’s side, put together a prototype consisting of several issues of our journals, MLN was one of them. I was blown away when they did the first demo. It was really cool. We knew that Mellon and NEH were looking for ways to cut library costs and were interested in electronic publishing. Our journals being mostly in the humanities and social sciences made this attractive to them.

“The grant funding from Mellon and NEH was crucial, of course. I remember that Sue Lewis and Todd Kelly went up early by train for the Mellon presentation at Michael Bloomberg’s offices in New York. Scott Bennett, Jack Goellner, and I drove in my van to save money.  Despite some technical glitches behind the scenes, the presentation went very well—and we all five came home in the van!

“It was intense and worrisome in the early years. It’s one thing to have a vision and be part of an exciting start of something new. But it’s another thing to make the transition to a sustainable operation.  One input I had was as the financial and business planner, and I had to devise a plan that would enable MUSE and our journals program to survive. One has to keep in mind that the World Wide Web, arising out of academia, was supposed to be free. Many had the belief that it would cost practically nothing to have an online journal, thus eliminating print. Librarians, perhaps naively, believed this would cut their subscription costs from commercial publishers.

“We really had no models. Not only were we pioneers in figuring out what a journal would look like online, but we were the pioneers of figuring out how to sell a collection like this. Our library colleagues helped us understand that they were looking for a licensing model, whereby everyone on their campus would have access. It was crucial to have a viable financial plan with input from everybody.  Obviously such a plan would lead to loss of individual subscribers to the print journals. A big question was how to control copyright and access. Once articles were available online, how could we prevent dissemination of articles anywhere in the world?   How could we provide electronic journals at a cost that the libraries were happy with and save our journals program?  What would online production costs look like? What would this do to the cost of print? Then there were even more technical questions. What are the technical issues and costs, such as maintaining a web server and providing access. What happens if the server goes down? What are the back ups? How do you provide an archive of a licensed product? How do you integrate electronic with print production? What kind of staff did we need? How do you market this?  So the Mellon/NEH grant period enabled us to experiment and hammer through these details; I’m proud that we met our expectation for subscriptions and revenue well before the grant ended.

Another ramification of launching Muse was that some of our longtime journals staff became worried about the future of print—and worried about their jobs. It created tension between the print and electronic teams. Once we got going, one of our biggest challenges was keeping a technical staff; we had particular vulnerability keeping a web administrator/master. Positions turned over rapidly in this area.

“Jack Goellner was a very supportive director at JHUP—I think the whole idea of the electronic future was amazing to him. (He never gave up his manual typewriter until his final years at the Press.) But he did a good job representing MUSE to Hopkins and the university press community. Robbie Dircks was wonderful and helped me a lot working through the financial plan. Michael Jensen, Mark Nolan, Melanie, and so many others helped MUSE succeed in the early days. Ellen Sauer was super enthusiastic. Scott Bennet and his successor Jim Neal had wide influence in the university library world. Bryan in the library provided the key technical knowledge that made Muse happen. Dawn Olson in the library gave a lot of insight from the librarian perspective. Bill Breichner helped with coordination of print and electronic production. Needless to say, Sue and Todd were key players in the founding and conceptualization of Muse. Sue was critical to getting production under way and Muse up and running once the grant was approved. She deserves a lot of the credit for Muse and making it happen.

“The decision to proceed was not difficult. Well before the grant ran out, we had a business model that worked, space procured, a production and technical team in place, libraries were talking about us, and we were thinking about next steps. I absolutely wanted to bring in journals from other presses. I had insight that we needed a large critical mass of scholarly journals available in one place.  A single electronic journal by itself or a few unrelated journals would not have all that much appeal, but a huge searchable database collection of journals available to a user from a computer anywhere on campus would be awesome, so I began campaigning with colleagues at other university presses to get them to join us. This led to the formation of the publishers group.

“The smart publishers saw what we were doing and saw the benefit, but there was worry about revenue and impact on print subscriptions. We had questions too. How do we make it profitable for the other publishers? How do we allocate revenue to individual journals? How do we account for and track usage for each journal? How do we make up for lost subscription revenue from print journals? Other publishers were concerned about how to hang on to their imprint if they joined Muse.  But bit by bit we worked through these issues and got others to join us. We established an annual publishers’ meeting so all could have input. Their reservations were allayed at the end of their first year with Muse when they saw their Muse royalty checks. It was a win-win for everyone involved, and we set a precedent for others to model. 

“Did MUSE exceed my expectations?  Absolutely! It did! I’m delighted that it really turned out was well as I hoped it would. I never would have envisioned it being as successful as it became.  Being the first one out there, creating the model, having the right people, having advice from library colleagues--it was the right thing at the right time. It advanced the Press’s mission to disseminate information far and wide.  It’s just amazing and it makes me very proud.”

—Marie Hansen