EXCLUSIVE – Amy Brand: Publishing for a new era
In the second of our Women in Scholarly Communications series, we meet Amy Brand, director and publisher of MIT Press
Supported by Cactus Communications
For someone who has become one of the most influential figures in scholarly communications, Amy Brand has a remarkably simple description of her career path: she feels that she never left academia.
Amy’s career has taken her through university administration, publishing, research infrastructure and technology before returning to lead MIT Press – but she sees a clear thread connecting every role she has held. While some would say she has changed direction several times, she views it rather differently.
“I feel like I’ve never really left academia,” she says. “To me, there’s a very clear continuity between studying language and studying how minds process language and the work around curating and disseminating information.”
Having studied linguistics and cognitive science, she could easily have remained in research. Instead, she became intrigued by the systems that enable research itself to be communicated. Looking back, she sees little distinction between understanding how knowledge is created and ensuring it reaches the people who need it: “The work that I do today, and have done for a long time on different parts of research communication, feels very consistent with those interests.”
That philosophy has underpinned a career spanning Harvard University, Digital Science and MIT Press.
More than a publisher
When asked what most shaped her approach to leading MIT Press, Amy doesn’t point first to publishing experience. Instead, she highlights her time working on tenure and promotion at Harvard University, where she gained a crucial perspective on how universities assess excellence and reward academic achievement.
That experience fundamentally changed how she thinks about the role of a university press.
“What matters to me, and how I think about what a publisher based at a university should be doing, is pretty distinctive,” she explains. “It’s perhaps shaped most by the experience of working on tenure and promotion at Harvard University, and thinking about how we determine excellence in the production of knowledge.”
Amy states that publishing cannot be separated from the wider research ecosystem; decisions about publishing affect careers, promotion, funding and ultimately the direction of research itself.
It also explains why MIT Press remains deeply embedded within MIT. Amy describes close collaboration with departments across the institute, from faculty committees to open learning initiatives exploring the future of textbooks. The press is not simply a publishing house attached to a university – it is an active participant in the university’s academic mission.
MIT’s longstanding commitment to OpenCourseWare – a web based publication of virtually all MIT course content – continues to influence that thinking, as do relationships with faculty, graduate students and administrators working on new approaches to educational content.
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Learning to take risks
Many successful careers appear logical when viewed in hindsight. Amy disagrees: instead, she describes a career built on what she calls “leaps of faith”.
“I’ve had this habit throughout my career of taking these kind-of leaps of faith because I have this deep belief… that you kind of get further faster by taking risks, making mistakes, reassessing.”
Importantly, she has never viewed career changes as abandoning previous work. Each move has built upon the last. The biggest leap, however, came early. Leaving academic science remains the one decision Amy occasionally imagines playing out differently – though not with regret: “I always think about that as having been the biggest jump that I took.”
Does she ever wish she had stayed? Only, she jokes, when she thinks about sabbaticals: “I am envious of that,” she laughs.
Innovation isn’t optional
MIT Press has a well-earned reputation as one of the sector’s most innovative university presses. Whether through Direct to Open, experiments with digital textbooks or new approaches to open scholarship, innovation has become a defining characteristic of the organisation.
But Amy rejects the idea that innovation is a luxury enabled by financial security. In fact, she argues precisely the opposite. For university presses, whose financial margins are often tighter than their commercial counterparts, that presents a paradox. Resources are needed to innovate, but standing still may prove even more expensive.
Amy believes publishers have to accept that reality: “The climate, ongoing changes and challenges that we’re all working through necessitate ongoing innovation. Either you take a leading role and innovate, or you’re just left behind.”
Perhaps no initiative illustrates MIT Press’s willingness to challenge established publishing models more than Direct to Open. Launched in 2021 to make scholarly monographs openly available regardless of an author’s institutional funding, the programme has become one of the most closely watched experiments in academic publishing.
Amy is unequivocal in describing it as a success – but perhaps not for the reason many might expect. The real measure, she says, was never simply whether it worked for MIT Press.
“Our goal was… the impact that it had beyond MIT across the community,” she says. “It engendered a lot of copycat models… and that’s really what we wanted to see.”
That willingness to encourage imitation reflects something particular to scholarly publishing. Despite competing for authors, readers and institutional budgets, many organisations continue to collaborate extensively in pursuit of wider goals such as open scholarship and research integrity.
Amy is also refreshingly candid about what did not work – looking back, she believes MIT Press underpriced the model and is now working to ensure the program has the necessary financial infrastructure for long-term stability.
Human judgement in an AI world
If there is one issue that dominates scholarly publishing today, it is artificial intelligence. The pace of change has been astonishing. As I point out during our conversation, AI never entered the discussion during Research Information interviews 10 years ago. Today it is impossible to avoid.
Amy smiles at the comparison, and recalls deliberately giving a conference presentation without using the word “innovation”, simply as an intellectual exercise. Today, avoiding “AI” would be almost impossible.
Yet amid all the discussion about technology, she believes one thing has become even more valuable: people. “A resounding yes,” Amy says, when asked whether human judgement remains central to scholarly publishing. “I think the stakes are even higher… in terms of human judgment and discernment and curation.”
For Amy, the real challenge is not whether machines become more capable. It is ensuring that society retains confidence in what is true: “One of the things that I spend a lot of time thinking about right now is the importance of maintaining our ability to know what’s credible and what’s true and what’s trustworthy.”
That responsibility, she argues, cannot simply be delegated to algorithms: “Ultimately that comes down to human curation and human judgment.”
Interestingly, she is optimistic about AI’s potential to strengthen publishing rather than weaken it. The peer-review system has undoubtedly been placed under strain in recent years, from paper mills to concerns over reproducibility, but Amy believes new technologies can help address many of those pressures.
The crucial distinction is that AI should augment expert judgement, not replace it: “These new technologies are going to make us better at what we do… they help, they don’t replace the human being who is doing the curation and the judgment and discernment.”
That optimism, however, is tempered by caution; Amy worries that the objectives of the largest AI companies are not necessarily aligned with those of the research community: “The interests of these large labs fundamentally may not be in alignment with the interests of the academic community in terms of sharing knowledge in the most trustworthy, verifiable way.”
The emergence of generative AI has also forced publishers to rethink some of their most fundamental assumptions: what does authorship mean when AI assists with writing? How should AI contributions be acknowledged?
Having helped develop the CRediT taxonomy for recognising research contributions, Amy sees those questions as a natural extension of work she began years ago. “Now we have to think about where AI fits in that taxonomy.”
Breaking down old divisions
Looking back across her career, Amy believes one of scholarly publishing’s biggest obstacles has not been technological at all. Instead, it has been cultural.
She has written extensively about what she describes as the “tribalism” between two communities with remarkably similar goals that have often found themselves positioned on opposite sides of the debate: “I’ve written a lot about this issue… this sort of tribalism and polarisation between the library and publisher communities.”
She understands why. Commercial publishing has sometimes generated understandable frustration within academia, and that sentiment has occasionally spilled over into attitudes towards publishers more generally. But Amy believes that resentment rarely produces good long-term decisions.
Having worked comfortably on both sides of that divide, she has often found herself acting as something of a translator between the two communities – and believes the industry has made real progress over the past decade, particularly in expanding access to research: “When it comes to the open sharing of knowledge, I think we are in a much better place.”
The next phase, however, is far less certain. Government policy, AI, funding models and changing patterns of knowledge consumption all introduce new variables that nobody yet fully understands.
Leadership without performance
Despite her prominence within scholarly publishing, Amy is surprisingly reluctant to describe herself as influential. In fact, she laughs off the suggestion – and, instead, returns repeatedly to a different theme: solving problems.
When I ask how her leadership style has evolved, she reflects less on organisations than on time and experience. She admits she entered leadership positions surprisingly early – even during university – but also confesses to being naturally shy.
Initially she assumed good leaders had to be charismatic, but experience taught her otherwise: “What’s mattered is having a real deep interest in doing the work and solving the problems. It’s the people who show up, the people that are interested in other people, the people that can sit back and listen.”
Amy’s philosophy also explains how she views ambition: “It’s not a performative responsibility.” Rather than seeking senior roles for their own sake, she has consistently pursued increasingly difficult problems: “I was ambitious to solve bigger and harder problems.”
She recalls moving into newly created positions at Harvard simply because they presented intellectually fascinating challenges around scholarly communication, research information and academic data: “Thinking, ‘This is extremely hard. I want to work on that problem.'”
For anyone entering scholarly publishing today, her advice reflects exactly that mindset. Don’t think only about publishing, but consider research communication more broadly. Research isn’t knowledge until it’s effectively communicated.”
Looking beyond today’s business models
Asked to imagine scholarly publishing 10 years from now, Amy doesn’t begin with technology; she starts with economics.
Publishers, she argues, are already producing content not only for human readers but increasingly for AI-mediated discovery systems. And finding sustainable financial models has become one of the defining challenges facing the industry, she says: “I’d like to see financial models around AI-mediated access to knowledge that sustain this industry because I think it’s absolutely critical.”
She is particularly concerned about relationships between AI companies and publishers becoming concentrated among only the largest organisations: “I’m concerned about smaller publishers being somewhat left behind.”
Beyond publishing
Away from work, Amy enjoys hiking, yoga, swimming, gardening, cooking and spending time with her three adult children. More recently, entertaining friends at home has become another favourite pastime.
And if scholarly publishing had never happened? Her answer is immediate: documentary filmmaking. “I’ve had this low-level sideline in documentary film and I absolutely love the medium – it’s another form of storytelling.”
It’s an unexpectedly fitting conclusion. Whether through books, journals, research infrastructure or film, Amy Brand’s career has been about enabling ideas to be communicated well, and allowing knowledge to fulfil its purpose.
Interview by Tim Gillett