Amy Brand


Amy Brand a leader in the field of scholarly communication and research information, is the current director of the MIT Press, a position she assumed in July 2015. Previously, Brand served as the assistant provost of faculty appointments and information at Harvard University, and as a vice president at Digital Science.

Background

Amy Brand grew up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she attended Barnard College. She moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1985 for graduate school, and has lived mainly in the Boston area since then.

Education

Brand received a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics from Barnard College. She graduated in 1989 with a PhD in cognitive science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Career

Brand was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania from 1989 until 1992, conducting research in child language development, but ultimately decided to switch careers and move into academic publishing. Her first position was as an acquisitions editor at Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in 1992.
In 1994, Brand was hired by the MIT Press as a cognitive science editor for Bradford Books, MIT Press' cognitive science imprint. Brand was instrumental in developing CogNet, MIT Press' digital cognitive science collection – one of the first online academic communities of its kind.
From 2000 to 2008, Brand served as CrossRef's director of business and product development. In 2008, Brand was hired by Harvard University as the program manager of the Office for Scholarly Communication. She was later promoted to university-wide Assistant Provost for Faculty Appointments and Information. Beginning in early 2014, Brand served as VP of academic and research relations as well as vice president of North America at Digital Science.

MIT Press directorship

After an extensive search led by a committee of both MIT-affiliates and external academic publishing experts, Brand was named director of the MIT Press in July 2015. Chris Bourg, director of the MIT Libraries, stated that Brand's “breadth of experience across many sectors of the scholarly communication system make her the ideal leader of the MIT Press at this time of tremendous change and opportunity in scholarly publishing.” As director, Brand leads the Press through all areas of development, including trade acquisition and growing MIT Press’s books and journal digital offerings.

Honors and organizations

In 2015, Brand was awarded the Award for Meritorious Achievement by the Council of Science Editors. This award is the highest given by the CSE, and is given to “a person or institution that embraces the purposes of the CSE – the improvement of scientific communication through the pursuit of high standards in all activities connected with editing.”
Brand currently serves on the Board on Research Data and Information of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. She is also on the DuraSpace board of directors, and chairs of the academic advisory board of Altmetric, a commercial service that tracks how works of scholarship are discussed online.
She was a co-creator of the CRediT taxonomy to reliably track contributions to team-based research outputs. She was a founding member of the ORCID Board, and advises on a number of community initiatives in digital scholarship.

Publications

Brand lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband, Matthew Brand, and has three children.