Project MUSE is an online database of current and back issues of peer-reviewed humanities and social sciences journals. It was founded in 1993 by Todd Kelley and Susan Lewis and is a project of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library. It had support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It provides 1200 subscribing libraries with access to 134,000 articles from 385 journals from 91 nonprofit publishers. Libraries pay on average $22 per year per title, compared to the the average $201 for a paper version.[1]
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, 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 only provides PDF files, and has a "Moving Wall" policy to protect publishers, such that only for 85% of its titles, articles less than 3 years old are not available.