Project Muse announced today that its Project Muse Editions e-books program is teaming up with the University Press e-book Consortium to become the University Press Content Consortium.

“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.

The University of Illinois Press currently has a signed agreement with Project Muse Editions to distribute UIP titles in the e-book format. With the new agreement in place, e-book sales through the UPCC will begin January 1, 2012.