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Thanks for following along with our #UPweek blog tour! For our last post, we are happy to feature a guest post from Abe Novick at Project MUSE, who talks about how we together to amplify authors’ work in various communities around the world.
Starting a partnership may not be so hard. Making it last and grow over two decades, delivering scholarly content around the world, takes a shared vision and commitment. In the case of University of Toronto Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, and two of its divisions in particular – Hopkins Fulfillment Services (HFS) and Project MUSE – what’s occurred is a win.
This productive partnership kicked off in 2003 when UTP, one of the largest presses in North America, began to provide their journal titles to Project MUSE for dissemination on its platform to be read across the world.
Speaking on behalf of MUSE’s journals program, Liz Brown, Publisher Relations Manager said, “Simply put, we love working with University of Toronto Press. Their journals – Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Canadian Public Policy, Modern Drama, and so many more – add tremendous value to MUSE, and the Toronto team is dynamic and forward-thinking. Further, we’re excited to have Toronto on board for our new Subscribe to Open (S2O) initiative!”
Moreover, because of this partnership, she added, “MUSE is able to share Toronto’s authors’ content with libraries and researchers around the globe, increasing reach, exposure, and revenue.”
Indeed, that’s not an exaggeration when considering the “where,” as MUSE truly reaches across oceans. Using the ISO Country Codes standard, MUSE has detected usage in some 237 of the 249 officially assigned country units in calendar year 2022.
Taking this fruitful relationship further, fast-forward almost twenty years to September of 2022, when UTP saw another opportunity and contributed more than 100 new book titles as well as a significant quantity of backlist books to the MUSE platform. These books, and many more since added to the MUSE corpus, are available to libraries worldwide through a variety of acquisition models, including our custom collections and evidence-based programs.
Amplifying “where” the mutually-beneficial partnership has been able to carry the work of both UTP and Hopkins Press authors, the relationship between the presses extends beyond Project MUSE, to a recently-established reciprocal distribution arrangement for their books.
Hopkins Fulfillment Services (HFS) is a full-service distributor for numerous university presses and non-profit institutions, and recently announced that UTP will join with its prestigious list of clients effective February 1, 2024. Specifically, HFS will provide sales and distribution for UTP books in the U.S. market.
UTP and Hopkins Press have much in common, as two mission-driven organizations and with long-standing publication programs and distribution businesses. In 2022, HFS entered into a distribution partnership with UTP for the Canadian market, on behalf of the HFS roster of clients.
According to Davida Breier, HFS’s Director, “We found UTP to be a strong partner with a similar model and approach. We’ve enjoyed collaborating with them in Canada and look forward to sharing our knowledge and resources here in the US.”
Likewise, Antonia Pop, Vice President of Publishing at UTP, added, “Hopkins shares many of our core values, notably a steadfast commitment to exemplary customer support and a focus on developments in the global marketplace.”
Now, Hopkins and UTP look to the future of this long and successful collaboration, substantially increasing the global dissemination of the many essential scholarly works produced by each press well into the decades to come.
