A two-year, $938,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will enable Johns Hopkins to develop MUSE Open—a free, public online platform for monographs—as part of Project MUSE. Project MUSE is the Johns Hopkins University Press' digital provider of humanities and social science books and journals, collected from more than 250 university presses and scholarly societies worldwide. MUSE Open will help users discover and access a broad variety of scholarly resources. According to Kathleen Keane, director of the press, this is the largest grant of its kind ever in support of Project MUSE.
Wendy Queen, director of Project MUSE, says the open access content will be a boon for researchers. "It is our firm belief that MUSE can provide significant exposure beyond that afforded by deposit in an institutional repository," she says. "To that end, we intend to collaborate across related projects in order to increase the value of OA monographs to publishers, authors, and end users within the scholarly community."
Project MUSE receives 23 million unique visits annually. The team behind the platform plans to collaborate with two partners on the grant who will help design and build the technological infrastructure: Brilliant Experience, a user experience research and design company, and the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation, a nonprofit that develops open-source solutions for scholarly materials.
The grant is one of several issued by the Mellon Foundation to support university presses' ability to produce, disseminate, and discover long-form digital publications in the humanities.
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