18 March 2020
In response to the challenges created by the global public health crisis of COVID-19, Project MUSE is supporting its participating publishers in making scholarly content temporarily available for free on the Project MUSE platform. With many higher education institutions moving into an exclusively online learning environment for the foreseeable future, it is hoped that easy access to vetted research in the humanities and social sciences, from a variety of university presses, societies, and related not-for-profit publishers, will help to support teaching, learning, and knowledge discovery for users worldwide.
Among the publishers currently opting to make content free on Project MUSE are Johns Hopkins University Press (all books and journals), Ohio State University Press (all books and journals), University of Nebraska Press (all books and journals), University of North Carolina Press (all books), Temple University Press (all books), and Vanderbilt University Press (selected books). Additional participants are expected, and the list of publishers offering free access to content will be continually updated.
Content that is freely available on the Project MUSE platform during the COVID-19 crisis will display a distinctive Free icon, different from the OA icon used for fully open access content on MUSE, or the familiar green checkmark that users associate with content held by their library. MUSE search results, by default, include any content to which a user has access, so will offer the researcher any relevant free, OA, or entitled articles and books. There are over 2000 open access books and a small number of fully OA journals on the MUSE platform.
"Serving the needs of libraries, publishers, and scholars has been core to the MUSE mission since day one," said Wendy Queen, Director, Project MUSE. "The global COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in enormous and rapid changes to the lives of all our constituents, with new methods of communicating and doing our work to which we must adapt daily. MUSE is grateful for the opportunity to support our community through this crisis, as a hub to connect users and the content they need, wherever they may safely do so."