Project MUSE Partners with HighWire

The Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP) has reached an agreement with Stanford University's HighWire Press to transition to the HighWire Open Platform as the new digital hosting and delivery platform for Project MUSE.

Over the past year, JHUP and its digital publishing unit Project MUSE have conducted an extensive search for a technology partner to assist in expanding the capacity of Project MUSE to support its current content offering and allow MUSE to pursue opportunities in developing new products, business models and service offerings for its growing community of more than 200 publishers and 2700 libraries.

"HighWire brings a wealth of experience in hosting content for publishers and MUSE will leverage that experience in developing a similar hosting model for the humanities and social sciences," said Dean Smith, Director of Project MUSE. "Our vision is to deliver the definitive state-of-the-art research environment in servicing our communities of publishers, libraries, and researchers."

"HighWire is committed to the widespread dissemination of scholarly research and to the latest advancements in information technology. They have developed a sophisticated platform and protocol for constant improvement that has served the needs of academic publishers large and small," said Kathleen Keane, Director of JHUP. "The Johns Hopkins University Press shares the objective of making scholarly research content available and usable."

HighWire's history tracks very closely with that of Project MUSE, with similar missions and both having launched in 1995. Several of HighWire's publishing partners (Duke University Press, The Oxford University Press, and the University of Wisconsin Press) also have content on the MUSE platform.

"We are proud to welcome such a prestigious leader in the humanities and social sciences to the HighWire community," said Tom Rump, Managing Director of HighWire. "We are excited to provide our innovative hosting platform to Project MUSE to ensure the highest levels of content integration, discoverability, and end-user engagement. Given the deep understanding of their customers' needs and their vision for the future of ebooks and publishing, MUSE will be an inspired digital partner."

"This partnership offers new collaboration opportunities for MUSE and HighWire to advance the thought leadership, end-user research, and publisher communities that each organization has pursued individually," affirmed John Sack, Founding Director of HighWire. "We look forward to finding ways in which together we can foster the next evolution of research communication."

The successful expansion of the Project MUSE publishing program is highly dependent on an advanced delivery infrastructure that combines rich functionality, customizability and a collaborative relationship with an innovative vendor of proven track record such as HighWire. This dynamic relationship will enable Project MUSE to create new products, incorporate new content types such as online references, foster personalization and collaboration, and continue to provide a sustainable model for libraries, publishers and researchers.