Project MUSE is an online database of current and back issues of peer-review

Peer review

Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...

ed humanities and social sciences journal

Academic journal

An academic journal is a peer-reviewed periodical in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as forums for the introduction and presentation for scrutiny of new research, and the critique of existing research...

s. It was founded in 1993 by Todd Kelley and Susan Lewis and is a project of the Johns Hopkins University Press

Johns Hopkins University Press

The Johns Hopkins University Press is the publishing division of the Johns Hopkins University. It was founded in 1878 and holds the distinction of being the oldest continuously running university press in the United States. The Press publishes books, journals, and electronic databases...

 and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library. It had support from the Mellon Foundation

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City and Princeton, New Jersey in the United States, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, endowed with wealth accumulated by the late Andrew W. Mellon of the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is the product of the 1969...

 and the National Endowment for the Humanities

National Endowment for the Humanities

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...

. In 2007 it provided 1200 subscribing libraries with access to 144,000 articles from 393 journals from 93 nonprofit publishers; the numbers rise every month. As of November, 2009, there were 158,450 articles from 427 journals by 106 publishers. Libraries pay on average $22 per year per title, compared to the average $201 for a paper version.

Typically, students and faculty at the subscribing libraries can find articles using search routines and can immediately access the articles. Its main rival is JSTOR

JSTOR

JSTOR is an online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides its member institutions full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society...

, which provides access to a different set of academic journals. The main differences are that MUSE provides both PDF and HTML files, and includes the most recent issues. JSTOR provides PDF files only, and has a "moving wall" policy to protect publishers, such that online issues of more than 90% of its titles do not become available until at least three years have passed since publication of the print issue.