Dean Smith

Introduction

Project MUSE just keeps getting better. Inclusion in the database is essential to the success of any journal.¹

Project MUSE is a thriving online content community of 500 scholarly journals, 133 not-for-profit publishers, 2,500 library subscribers and millions of users around the world in the humanities and social sciences. During 2013, the platform will expand to include more than 23,000 e-books from 83 publishers.

Project MUSE began in 1993 as a conversation between Jack Goellner, the Director of the Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP), and Scott Bennett, Director of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Hopkins, about how they could work together to find a solution to the growing crisis in scholarly publishing. Library budgets were shrinking and price increases for scientific, technical and medical (STM) journals were outstripping inflation. Books were losing money at the press and library monograph budgets were beginning to dry up. How could smaller journals in the humanities and social sciences afford to have a digital presence?

Johns Hopkins explored options for producing electronic versions of the 40 journals then in JHUP’s programme. Grant funding to pursue prototypes was secured from the Carnegie-Mellon Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities in 1995, and a MUSE pilot project ensued with eight journals published online in full text. Several libraries, including members of the Oberlin Group of Liberal Arts College Libraries and the Virtual Library of Virginia consortia, served as beta testers for the electronic journals, providing feedback on presentation and searching capabilities.² By the end of 1996, all of the JHUP journals had been produced online and a pilot offer of subscriptions to the MUSE collection was offered to libraries commencing in January 1997. In 2000, 11 additional university presses joined Project MUSE. These presses included Indiana University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Universities of Toronto, Nebraska and North Carolina. Since 1995, its electronic journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special and school libraries worldwide. In early 2011, Project MUSE began cooperating on its e-book initiative with the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC), an assembly of major university presses and related scholarly publishers that grew out of extensive research into a viable model for a collaborative university press electronic book offering.

What started as a conversation 15 years ago between a publisher and librarian continues to evolve and expand in dynamic ways. MUSE celebrated its 15th anniversary in 2010 and has been working to strengthen its leadership position and plan for the next 15 years of the Project. Amid sweeping change in academic publishing, Project MUSE has emerged as the archetype for the dissemination of premium journal content. MUSE has enabled academic publishers to generate valuable revenue and has paved the way for more than 100 presses profitably to reach global audiences with journal content. For librarians, Project MUSE’s affordable, tiered pricing structure enables libraries to choose a customised offering that meets their budget, usage and research needs. We thought this was not only a way that the press and the library could collaborate but it was something that held great promise for the future of scholarly communication.³

The MUSE mission: a balancing act

Project MUSE has played a major role in transforming the scholarly journal landscape by staying close to its mission of balancing the interests of publishers, libraries and end-user communities to provide a sustainable model for ensuring delivery and widespread access to content in the humanities and social sciences. Since 2000, Project MUSE has distributed more than $84 million in royalties to publishers and generated $100 million in savings to libraries. Many publishers rely on these monies to sustain their publishing operations.

In an environment of information overload, where users increasingly value credentialled knowledge, every page of the MUSE site reinforces the quality of the content in the collection. Charles Wilkinson, Director of Purdue University Press, commented: ‘And, unlike many nameless aggregations, MUSE pays a living wage.’⁴

Academic libraries have used these savings to withstand annual budget cuts and provide a diverse range of content to their patrons. Project MUSE is again poised for growth and expansion to meet the needs of a changing competitive market and stands apart as a resource designed by the academic community for the academic community. We are focused on achieving goals that will leverage our strengths and enhance the market position of Project MUSE. These strategic actions include:

Our staff has amassed over 100 years of experience working on the platform. We are librarians, engineers, architects, marketers, publishers and researchers. A debt of gratitude is owed to Wendy Queen (Publishing Technologies), Melanie Schaffner (Sales and Marketing), and Elizabeth Brown (Content Development) for their outstanding contributions on a daily basis to this enterprise.

The MUSE experiencemanaging the digital transition

Since its inception, MUSE has adapted and evolved with the needs of publishers, libraries and end users. Listening to our community since 1995, we have altered our approach to pricing for libraries and to the paying out of royalties to publishers, expanded our content offering to include current and now back issues of journals, developed technologies to improve the publisher experience and demonstrated a commitment to increased functionality for the end-user. By 2004, the MUSE product had been well received by the library market but the number of titles was growing beyond the budgetary limits of libraries. Pricing was based on the subscription list prices of the journals provided by the publishers. Librarians were sceptical of the sustainability of the model. The majority of the business (90 per cent) was driven by consortia who were receiving a 50 per cent volume discount. Using print prices as the basis for the subscription, the model called for every institution – large or small – to pay a similar price. During the period of rapid growth from 2000 to 2004, publishers received new revenues from inclusion in MUSE. Now they were seeing massive print cancellations by libraries because of increasing economic pressures and the electronic revenues were not covering the losses.

MUSE hired October Ivins and Judy Luther to develop a new approach. Usage was beginning to emerge as a proxy for value as a result of the COUNTER initiative and Carnegie Classifications were being used to determine the size of a particular institution. Engaging in intensive market research, Ivins and Luther developed a usage-based model that was decoupled from print and based on size of institution – from the largest Association of Research Libraries (ARL) library to the smallest community college – to enable participation from institutions of all types. Usage bands were created within the tiers to recognise high and low users of the content.

This new pricing approach provided substantial value for institutions. New collection options were introduced to make available smaller subsets of titles. The average 2013 subscription list price for titles on the platform was $120. For the largest ARL library, the MUSE average subscription per title is $85 which reinforces the value proposition to libraries. By providing more options for institutions to participate, Project MUSE has grown annual revenues by 70 per cent over the last five years from $12.8 to $22 million. Publishers receive 80 per cent of those revenues.

During this timeframe, Project MUSE also worked on a new royalty payout structure for publishers by developing a performance-based model for paying publisher royalties based on three factors: (1) usage, (2) bytes and (3) score. Usage accounts for 50 per cent of the publisher payout; bytes or the amount of content on the platform 30 per cent, and a ten-point score that looks at a journal’s market acceptance based on its inclusion in databases (20 per cent). This new model has been extremely effective in delivering meaningful revenues to publishers. In addition, MUSE will pay for three years’ worth of cancellations as journals transition from print to web. Annual costs are split with publishers. Based on this new structure, Project MUSE has paid out 75 per cent of its revenues to publishers since 2008. For 2012, publishers received $16.9 million.

Project MUSE played an integral role in the acceleration from print subscriptions to electronic access for many publishers in the humanities and social sciences. Global markets for journals have opened in Western Europe, Asia, Japan, China and Latin America. There are 500 subscriptions in developing countries through the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications – Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information relationship including Honduras, Mauritius, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, Rwanda, Bangladesh and Ethiopia.

The MUSE experience: reinventing the platform at the article level

The Project MUSE technology staff have built the platform organically and without outside assistance since 1995. In 2007, Web 2.0 and social networking tools drove the reinvention of the MUSE platform. The focus of the redesign was to give the end-user more tools at the article level with the goal of increasing the amount of time a user spends on the site. In addition to a more flexible layout, social bookmarking links, journal alerts and linked subject headings were added for launch.

Usage statistics provided the metrics to learn further what tools are widely used and how users are engaging with the content. This helped create a commitment to continuous improvement and a streamlining of processes. In an effort to improve the granularity of content, speed of publication times and efficiency by over 50 per cent, MUSE also adopted an XML-workflow in 2007.

Project MUSE adds value at the article level through an indexing process by providing a controlled vocabulary and name authority recognition. As a result MUSE provides clickable subject headings on every article, as well as a table of contents and search results, which bring together topics and subjects in a more precise fashion. These are also used in the ‘More Like This’ algorithm and in the search relevance ranking. Overall article level enhancements have been a success. The creation of additional functionality has increased the amount of time a user spends on the site. The average session length has increased from 1.25 articles per session in 2008 to 2 articles in the first half of 2012.

MUSE has expanded the platform with the addition of e-book content in 2012 and will continue to deliver tools to create even greater connections between content and formats because driving usage is a critical activity that will increase revenues for publishers and lower cost per download for libraries. The cost per download for MUSE library customers was $1.75 in 2012. Publishers received $1.69 for every download of their content. Royalty per title in 2010 was approximately $30,000.

The MUSE experience: adopting a content neutral approach

At the 2010 MUSE Publisher meeting in Baltimore, we shared with our community a desire to develop an e-books platform with interested publishers. They had asked for this before and the topic was of great interest to the participants in the room. We viewed this as an opportunity once again to take a leadership position, just as we had done for journals fifteen years ago, and help save the scholarly monograph from extinction as the costs of print book publishing continue to increase in the face of diminishing sales. We had developed a request for proposal and had sent it to e-book vendors such as eBrary, NetLibrary and Electronic Book Library (EBL). A librarian raised her hand and stood up. ‘This won’t have any meaning unless these e-books are integrated on the Project MUSE platform,’ said Deborah Slingluff, Associate Director of the Sheridan Libraries at Hopkins. ‘Do for e-books what MUSE does for journals.’

Once again, a colleague from the Johns Hopkins University stepped forward to collaborate with us. More than fifteen years since the first conversations about a platform with notes written on napkins in a faculty board meeting we were back at the beginning of something special again. We had been exploring the Hopkins library search interface and had noticed that book and journal content appeared side-by-side in the search results but that it was difficult to tell whether it was a journal or book or even who had published it. Content was the critical driving factor of the result – not format or publisher brand, but information. This became our rallying cry and confirmed an idea that we had been kicking around – to create a research platform of e-book chapters and journal articles discoverable in the same search environment. We announced our programme shortly thereafter, Project MUSE Editions, to serve both MUSE Publishers and the Hopkins Fulfillment Service publishers.

We met with 20 prospective publishers at the 2010 Association of American University Presses Meeting in Salt Lake and explained our business model. The publishers would set prices based on the list price of the title and Project MUSE would assemble the collections in subject areas and in complete collections. We also met with the University Press e-book Consortium (UPeC) in Salt Lake. They were in the process of collecting 60 letters of intent from university press publishers and other not-for-profit entities. UPeC had received a Mellon Grant to move forward with research and modelling. They canvassed more than 1,000 librarians on multiple occasions over a two-year period to find out what the library community wanted as far as accessing e-books in a research setting. From their data, they developed a collection-based model to sell e-books to libraries in complete as well as subject-based collections. They had determined a market existed for it. Librarians wanted the same unlimited downloading privileges that existed for journals. They wanted limited to no digital rights management (DRM). They wanted ownership.

Alex Holzman (Temple University Press), Steve Maikowski (NYU Press), Marlie Wasserman (Rutgers University Press), Eric Halpern (Penn University Press) and Donna Shear (University of Nebraska Press) worked with consultants Raym Crow, October Ivins, and Judy Luther to bridge the gap between the academic library market and university press publishers. They were the true pioneers of university press e-book offerings because they journeyed where only vendors had gone before. Our models differed slightly when it came to pricing. UPeC derived their collection price using value-based metrics and an average price per title. This would be a requirement to win the Request for Proposal (RFP) they were developing in an effort to select an e-book vendor. It was believed that JSTOR, Cambridge University Press and HighWire were in the running for this business.

By fall of 2010, Project MUSE Editions had 28 agreements in place with publishers. We were moving forward and hoped to have a chance to bid on the RFP. We were honoured when the mail arrived in November and the extensive UPeC RFP was included. The programme we had developed had caught their attention. We went about the task of responding to the requirements document, following the instructions exactly. We adopted the strategy of aligning our vision with UPeC. If the consortia really wanted to transform the e-book market, the most compelling way to do that would be to join forces with one of the largest and most successful aggregations of humanities and social sciences journals in the world. We presented a strong case to the UPeC Board in late January under the theme of ‘One Vision’.

We were doing this for the community and were part of it. We committed to investing several million dollars to make this happen and to hiring 15 additional staff members at the outset. We developed the name the University Press Content Consortia (UPCC) to signal to the market that book and journal content together was only the beginning. In the future, we will transform the platform again to include reference works, datasets, multimedia, annotation, collaboration and commenting features.

After much discussion and follow-up, they selected us as their partner.

There is enormous value in providing our students and faculty with an integrated discovery and access environment that includes not only an expanding database of university press monographs but also embraces the journals in Project MUSE. (James G. Neal, VP for Information Services and University Librarian, Columbia University)⁵

As I write this case study, 23,000 e-books from 83 publishers have been launched on a reinvented MUSE platform integrating book and journal content for the first time ever in the humanities and social sciences. With an ongoing commitment to improving our technology and expanding capacity, MUSE developed an RFP to find a suitable technology partner. MUSE has recently signed an agreement with HighWire as the hosting solution of the future for the book and journal content. Over the next five years our goal is to build the definitive research environment in the humanities and social sciences. That means adding services as well as content to our platform. We anticipate being able to offer readers increased customisation of the MUSE platform, allowing users to create personal libraries within the MUSE environment and for cataloguing and annotating their reading. We are looking to empower the individual scholar with the tools be able to make new discoveries and interpretations of texts.

The MUSE message: evolve, expand, engage and embrace the future

Today, the MUSE staff are actively engaged in:

Key takeaways are the following:

Muse 2020

We see an exciting future for the expansion of content on the MUSE platform. We are fortunate to have strengthened our team with new Associate Director Terry Ehling who is responsible for Content Development and Publisher Relations. We are exploring additional services for our publishers to help them realise their dreams. We see an opportunity to link from the primary document to the journal article to the e-book chapter to the YouTube lecture to the podcast to the commentary to the group collaboration in an endless cyclical endeavour of research and investigation.