Project MUSE debuted in 1995 as a collaboration between the Johns Hopkins University Press and the library at Johns Hopkins University, the first of its kind in scholarly humanities publishing. Grants from the Mellon Foundation and the NEH allowed Project MUSE to go live in 1995. In 2000, Project MUSE expanded by inviting other scholarly presses and journals to benefit from this successful publishing initiative.

In 2011, Project MUSE partnered with the University Press e-Book Consortium to establish the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC) Book Collections on Project MUSE. With a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2016, Project MUSE developed MUSE Open with the goal of distributing open access monographs on the Project MUSE platform to be broadly shared. Today, Project MUSE is still a not-for-profit collaboration with the goal of disseminating quality scholarship via a model that meets the needs of both libraries and publishers around the world.

The Hekman Library subscribes to Project MUSE.