Project MUSE, a provider of humanities and social science periodical content for libraries, has announced a new initiative to incorporate scholarly book content into its research platform and product offerings. Beginning in 2011, e-book collections will be available for purchase alongside MUSE journal collections, with an integrated discovery environment that allows for browsing and searching journal and book content side-by-side.
MUSE, a collaborative project which currently publishes online over 450 journals from more than 100 not-for-profit scholarly presses, will partner with many of the same publishers to offer high quality, peer-reviewed academic books electronically. Project MUSE is managed by the Johns Hopkins University Press, which also operates Hopkins Fulfillment Services (HFS) as a distribution arm for many distinguished university presses. HFS client presses are also among the first group of publishers committed to participating in the new book initiative.
The e-books programme, called Project MUSE Editions, has to date signed contracts with several publishers to include in the new offering books from their upcoming scholarly monograph frontlists. These include Baylor University Press, Brookings Institution Press, ELT Press, Indiana University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Kent State University Press, Penn State University Press, Purdue University Press, and University of Illinois Press. Talks are ongoing with several other MUSE and HFS client publishers, with more participants expected to be announced before the end of this year.
Publishers participating in the programme will select and set prices for the frontlist books they offer through MUSE e-book collections. The initiative is focused on scholarly monographs, and is not expected to include textbooks, reference books, trade titles or other books outside the project scope. Project MUSE will reserve the right to reject books that do not fit within its collection parameters.
Book content on MUSE will be offered via a purchase model, on a twice-yearly seasonal (Spring/Fall) basis. Libraries will 'pre-purchase' access to a collection of the frontlist monograph titles included in the upcoming season's publishing schedule from the participating publishers.
MUSE expects to offer its first e-book collection for the Fall 2011 season, with between 250-500 frontlist monograph titles anticipated for inclusion in the collection. Pricing for book collections on MUSE will be based upon the sum of the list prices of the included titles, as set by the books' publishers, with tiered discounting of the collection price modeled upon MUSE's Carnegie Classification-based tiered pricing for its journal collections. Consortium purchase programmes will also be available.
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