Book Exhibition

Our Mission
Project MUSE promotes the publication and discovery of essential, current humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged in 1995 from a partnership between Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.

Our Brand Pillars
Discoverability Powers Knowledge
Our charge is to sustain the scholarly publishing ecosystem and grow our collective knowledge. We prioritize evidence-based, peer-reviewed scholarship developed through close collaboration between scholars and mission-driven publishers. Enhancing the discoverability of high-quality scholarship in the world is the first step to making it a better, more curious place. 

Interdisciplinary Research for an Intersectional World
Crossing disciplines to strengthen ideas is crucial to unraveling the complexity of our world. Discoveries in humanities and social sciences directly influence developments in other fields, emphasizing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach. Our wide-ranging scholarship helps people address society’s most pressing challenges from new angles.

Evolving for Our Community
The world of publishing is constantly advancing—and so are we. We adapt our platform, hosting, and licensing options so MUSE and our partners can best serve publishers and institutions. Our business model sustains our publishers while keeping our products affordable for libraries. The future of the nonprofit scholarly community depends on it.

By Scholars, For Scholars
We were founded by Johns Hopkins University Press on the belief that scholarly discourse has the power to advance humanity. We’re passionate about continuous collaboration with publishers and libraries to ensure that everyone has access to dependable research—and can use it as they unearth new discoveries. Together, we help scholarly works find a place in the world so that they can change the world.

Our History
The groundbreaking idea for Project MUSE debuted in the mid 1990s as a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University. Hosting humanities journals on the World Wide Web—still a novel concept at the time—was groundbreaking in digital scholarly humanities publishing. Grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed Project MUSE to officially launch with Johns Hopkins University Press journals in 1995. 

In 2000, Project MUSE expanded by inviting other university presses and nonprofit scholarly publishers to host their journals on the MUSE platform. More publishers benefiting from this successful publishing initiative cemented Project MUSE's mission as a leading provider of online journals in the humanities and social sciences. 

Then in 2011, Project MUSE partnered with the University Press e-Book Consortium to establish the University Press Content Consortium Book Collections on Project MUSE. 

With a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2016, Project MUSE developed MUSE Open with the goal of distributing OA monographs on the Project MUSE platform to be broadly shared, widely discoverable, and richly linked.

In 2020, Project MUSE celebrated its 25th anniversary with the creation of a special website featuring a timeline, 25 MUSE makers, and a celebratory video. 

In 2021, Project MUSE received a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Public Knowledge Program to study the innovative business model for open access journal publishing known as "Subscribe to Open." MUSE launched its inaugural offering of over 100 journals from over 25 nonprofit publishers in 2025. 

Today, Project MUSE remains a prominent global platform of multi-disciplinary humanities and social science scholarly content from nonprofit publishers. Through our various institutional sales models and support of open access, MUSE continues to connect current scholarship with researchers, students, and general readers.