News Release

Under Project Muse, the more than 40 prestigious scholarly journals published by Johns Hopkins will be made available to students, scholars and researchers throughout the world via the World Wide Web portion of the Internet. The online publication of the journals, such as Configurations and Modern Language Notes, broadens the accessibility and impact of the work; a prototype of the project is available on the World Wide Web at http://muse.mse.jhu.edu. The entire process will take about three years to complete; one new journal will go online each month.

"It is one of the first ventures of its kind," project co- manager Ellen Sauer said. "We hope Project Muse will provide the blueprint that other scholarly publishers will emulate." Project Muse electronic subscriptions to the Hopkins journals will cost 10 percent less than subscriptions to print versions; only one subscription is needed for campus-wide availability.

The National Endowment for the Humanities recently awarded $320,000 to Project Muse; the project received the highest possible marks from each of the nine NEH reviewers. Project Muse was launched with $400,000 grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

"This is an outstanding proposal," one of the NEH reviewers wrote. "JHU helped define scholarship in the 19th century and it may well help us redefine it again with this."