Supporting Digital Scholarship

“Honestly, I think the greatest contribution I made to Project MUSE was helping Sue Lewis develop her career at Penn State Press, where I promoted her to journals manager. She was hired away by JHUP to develop Project MUSE alongside Michel Jensen, and those two are the key personnel who got MUSE up and running.

“I can tell you that, partly because Sue was a pioneer of MUSE, we at PSUP were among the first presses to join MUSE when it expanded beyond JHUP's own journals.  And we stayed a member through the entire time I remained as director.  

“Project MUSE provided the opportunity for PSUP to make the transition from print to digital in journal publishing, a transition a small press like ours otherwise could not have afforded to do.  Being a part of MUSE was vital to the success of our journals program, which operated at a surplus which allowed us to internally subsidize some of the monograph publishing we were doing.

“I recall urging MUSE to add monographs to its program, and I was a strong advocate of open access in scholarly publishing, having drafted the AAUP Statement on Open Access when I was AAUP president in 2007-2008. I’ve been pleased to see the addition of books to the collection, and I applaud MUSE’s substantial efforts to create opportunities for publishers to offer free and open access content.”

—Sandy Thatcher