Project MUSE, a provider of digital Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) content, has announced the availability of nearly 300 open access (OA) books on its new re-designed platform. The books will be delivered in a highly-discoverable and adaptable format using user-friendly HTML5, rather than static PDFs, and will include titles from Johns Hopkins University Press, Cornell University Press, Duke University Press, University of Hawai'i Press, University of Michigan Press, Syracuse University Press, The MIT Press, and Temple University Press.
The new 'HTML5 OA' titles greatly enhance a collection of almost 600 OA books in PDF format that were already available on MUSE, bringing the total of OA books to over 800. MUSE plans to add more HTML5 OA books each year. The initiative was made possible by a two-year grant of nearly $1 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Funds were used to develop an open source workflow for transforming epub files into HTML5 and, most importantly for users, launch a scholar-informed redesign of the Project MUSE interface that emphasises simplicity, accessibility, and personalisation. The redesigned platform includes robust support for discovery and linking, along with preservation with trusted third parties, assuring wide dissemination of OA book content on MUSE. The platform's enhanced analytics services will help publishers understand the impact of making books freely available.
Project MUSE anticipates hosting hundreds more OA scholarly books, funded through initiatives including the NEH Humanities Open Book program, Knowledge Unlatched, TOME, Mellon grants, and other publisher- and institution-driven programs. Open access content on MUSE is fully integrated and supported alongside the more than 54,000 books and over 650 scholarly journal titles also on the platform.
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