For more than 10,000 years, cats have prowled at the edges of human life. But, starting only a few decades ago, hundreds of millions of them became pets. In Cats, Rod Phillips shares a sweeping cultural and social history of felines, tracing their shifting place across societies and centuries, from ancient Egypt's revered hunters to Europe's suspected familiars of witches and from shipboard rodent controllers to cherished internet icons.

On today’s episode, portal: Libraries and the Academy chats with Harvard librarian Elizabeth Szkirpan, whose new article looks at how academic libraries can develop metrics to translate library service into key institutional performance indicators.

More than 100 journals’ current volumes are now OA thanks to the unwavering support of libraries and institutions worldwide. This success reflects a collective commitment to ensuring that vital humanities and social sciences scholarship is accessible to everyone, free from paywalls.

We extend our deepest gratitude to the global community of publishers, libraries and the S2O Community of Practice who collectively made this possible. Their shared vision and support have helped realize a path forward for open access in disciplines that are often underserved by other OA funding models.

This milestone is a testament to the power of community and the shared value of making knowledge available to all.

What is a university for? Is it a sanctuary for disciplined study, or has it become something else entirely? In After the University, Chad Wellmon traces the long and often uneasy relationship between higher learning and the institutions that claim to protect it. Moving from the guilds of medieval Paris and the knowledge factories of Enlightenment-era Göttingen to the research empires of Berlin and Berkeley, Wellmon shows how the modern university has repeatedly reshaped itself to serve shifting social and political demands.

Richard Gabri discusses his new ELH article, revealing intertextual evidence that enigmatic antihero Jay Gatsby is modeled on a Conrad character, suggesting new dimensions to Fitzgerald's construction of race in The Great Gatsby.

Project MUSE, in collaboration with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, announces a new landmark in the Museum’s longstanding Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 (ECG) series: ECG volumes I-IV are now fully searchable, open access digital publications freely available to everyone around the world.