Two major University Press E-book initiatives announce merger

Two major university press e-book initiatives - Project MUSE Editions (PME) and the University Press e-book Consortium (UPeC) - have joined forces. The result of this merger - the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC) - will launch January 1, 2012. "This is a great moment," said Kathleen Keane, director of the Johns Hopkins University Press, home of Project MUSE. "By bringing these two initiatives together, we have taken a major step forward to ensure the ongoing viability of university presses." The partnership allows e-books from an anticipated 60-70 university presses and non-profit scholarly presses - representing as many as 30,000 frontlist and backlist titles - to be discovered and searched in an integrated environment with content from nearly 500 journals currently on MUSE