This year is the 10th anniversary of the launch of Project Muse. I wasn't going to blog the news, since PM isn't OA. But then I read this in Greg Rienzi's story for the Johns Hopkins University Gazette (December 12, 2005):
In just three years, Project Muse was able to break even....Project Muse's current annual revenue is approximately $9 million, with a lion's share of the profits returned to the publishers who own the participating journals. Keane said that Muse has also produced a modest surplus every year since 1999. "As a result, Project Muse has been generating its own working capital. This would be an excellent financial result for any business started in 1995, and it's a rare achievement in the world of academic library and university press ventures," she said.
Here's my question: Why not use the surpluses to amortize the costs of digitization and overhead so that, over time, PM can make more and more of its content OA?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/13/2005 12:54:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
