From: Melanie Schaffner <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 14:26:03 -0400

THE MELLON FOUNDATION TO FUND MUSE OPEN, A NEW OA PLATFORM

The Johns Hopkins University Receives a Major Grant to Develop and Deploy
a Platform to Host OA Monographs on Project MUSE

July 12, 2016, Baltimore, MD—The Johns Hopkins University announced today
that it is has been awarded a two-year $938,000 grant from the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation to develop and deploy MUSE Open in Project MUSE, a unit
of The Johns Hopkins University Press. This is one in a series of grants
issued by the Mellon Foundation that support US university presses'
ability to edit, produce, market, disseminate, and discover long-form
digital publications in the humanities.  MUSE Open is planned as an Open
Access (OA) platform for monographs in the humanities and social sciences
that will be a public-facing, mission-focused aggregator that adds
significant long-term value to the lifecycle of scholarly resources.
According to Kathleen Keane, Director of Johns Hopkins University Press,
this is the largest grant of its kind ever in support of Project MUSE,
JHUP's trusted provider of authoritative humanities and social science
books and journals from more than 250 of the world's most distinguished
university presses and scholarly societies.

In the arena of open access monograph production, distribution of the
final monograph via the MUSE platform is an essential element in ensuring
the dissemination, discovery, accessibility, and utility of the works to
be found on MUSE Open. Project MUSE has demonstrated network effects; it
realizes 23 million unique visits annually. MUSE looks forward to
collaborating with two key partners on the grant, Brilliant Experience and
the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation, who will be instrumental in the
design and the technological infrastructure build.

"The challenge being addressed by MUSE Open is a critical one if more
university press books are going to be made available via Open Access.
That is, how do we ensure that these publications are as discoverable and
as usable as our traditional ones?" noted John Sherer, Director of the
University of North Carolina Press.

Wendy Queen, Director of Project MUSE added, "We believe that OA content
embedded in the linked open data environment, but also made available
adjacent to a large corpus of analogous and complementary works in the
humanities and qualitative social sciences will offer a definite benefit
to researchers. As of January 2016, 42,000 books and 650 journals were
being hosted on the MUSE platform.  Indeed, it is our firm belief that
MUSE can provide significant exposure beyond that afforded by deposit in
an institutional repository.  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."

Melanie Schaffner
Director, Sales and Marketing
Project MUSE
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 N Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21218 USA
P 410-516-3846
F 410-516-3846
[log in to unmask]
http://muse.jhu.edu