While writing this post, nestled here in Baltimore, the world watched and witnessed the devastating collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, after it was struck by a cargo ship. The bridge, a landmark here in Charm City, arched over the Patapsco River carrying more than 12.4 million commercial and passenger vehicles in 2023. Along with its striking profile against our city skyline, it was, like all bridges, a way to connect what ordinarily would be two separate, far away points. 

It made us realize, how here and within Johns Hopkins University Press, there's an incredibly special group, that we like to think is instrumental in helping the world for the better by connecting readers, publishers, and libraries, bringing all of them together by sharing incredible knowledge and trusted scholarship.

At the Press, along with divisions that publish amazing peer-reviewed books and numerous academic journals, there is Project MUSE. If you are not familiar, MUSE is a digital platform and aggregator that serves as an integral part of the scholarly communications ecosystem and is the platform of choice for respected not-for-profit publishers. If you are familiar, you may know that it’s approaching its 30-year anniversary. Project MUSE is home to more than 800 journals and now over 100,000 books from some 400 leading university presses, scholarly societies, and related publishers.

But as wide and encompassing as those numbers are, the depth and breadth of the content within humanities and social sciences address topic areas from Global Literature to Women’s Studies, African Studies, Music, Film, Theatre, Religious Studies and more. Moreover, we are constantly growing our catalog of content helping to advance scholarship and research around the world.

Most recently, we’ve partnered with Latin American university presses and scholarly publishers to bring libraries, scholars, and a wide range of readers a wealth of new books on Latin American studies in Spanish from publishers in Latin America. You can read more about this new initiative in the previous post from last week, here.

Likewise, MUSE is able to help its publishers, and in turn authors, amplify their voices in far-away places, that would not ordinarily have access to such scholarship.

In fact, while the U.N. comprises 195 countries, there are some not on the list, but that MUSE still reaches, such as Taiwan, Palestine and other dependent territories such as Puerto Rico. Using ISO Country Codes standard, MUSE has detected usage in some 237 of the 249 officially assigned country units in calendar year 2022.

Interestingly, and as part of its mission to promote the broad dissemination of essential humanities and social science scholarship, and in support of equity in access to scholarly resources, Project MUSE and its participating publishers earlier this year, announced a program to provide free access to selected journal titles in many low-income countries.

More than 250 journals from nearly 30 publishers committed to the program and are currently providing free access to individuals in 19 countries, primarily in Africa. The free access program is in collaboration with Google Scholar, which is indexing the free journal content to ensure it is widely discoverable, while MUSE provides free access to any user connecting via an IP address from the qualifying countries. All available volumes and issues from the participating journal titles may be accessed for free.

“This program allows Project MUSE to provide valuable scholarly journal content to countries that are among the hardest to reach,” said Elizabeth Brown, Publisher Relations Manager at Project MUSE. “We thank our publishers for their enthusiastic participation!”

Project MUSE and the participating publishers were delighted to offer this free access to researchers and readers in these frequently underserved communities, as one part of our overall commitment to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. You can visit the MUSE web site for a list of the participating journal titles, along with the list of countries with free access.

Also, Project MUSE hosts more than 5,000 fully open access books, and several open access journals; these are freely available to everyone, worldwide.

This over-arching effort aligns with a new innovative research model we are launching called Subscribe to Open (S2O) in 2025 -- helping to provide an equitable, sustainable model for accessing scholarly content that meets the needs of a diverse audience, while aligning with budget constraints and institutional goals.

With this groundbreaking move, we are leading the way toward global research and equity for readers, non-profits, and small publishers and creating a bridge across oceans, continents and ideas for libraries and scholars around the world.

Learn more about the publishers participating in this program: https://about.muse.jhu.edu/muse/s2o/

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