Amy Brand (born October 20, 1962) is an American academic. Brand is the current Director and Publisher 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.[1]
In 1994, Brand joined the MIT Press as a cognitive science editor for Bradford Books, MIT Press' cognitive science imprint.[3] She was instrumental in developing CogNet, MIT Press's digital cognitive science collection – one of the first online academic communities of its kind.[4]
From 2000 to 2008, Brand served as CrossRef's director of business and product development.[5] In 2008 she joined Harvard University as the program manager of the Office for Scholarly Communication.[2] She was later promoted to university-wide Assistant Provost for Faculty Appointments and Information.[1] Beginning in early 2014, Brand served as vice president of academic and research relations as well as vice president of North America at Digital Science.[6]
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.”[1] As director, Brand leads the Press through all areas of development, including trade acquisition and growing MIT Press’s books and journal digital offerings.[7]
Brand was executive producer of the documentary Picture a Scientist, a 2020 selection of the Tribeca Film Festival that highlights gender inequality in science.
Brand co-created the CRediT taxonomy to reliably track contributions to team-based research outputs.[10] She was a founding member of the ORCID Board,[11] and advises on a number of community initiatives in digital scholarship.[6]
Brand was awarded the Laya Wiesner Community Award (2021)[12] and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award (2021).[13] In 2015, Brand was awarded the Award for Meritorious Achievement by the Council of Science Editors (CSE). 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.”[14]
^Policy and Global Affairs Division. "Members." Board on Research Data and Information. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, 2016. Web. 19 December 2016.
^Brand, Amy, James Butcher, Meg Buzzi, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Ann Gabriel, Rikk Mulligan, Vivian Siegel, Matt Spitzer, Jamie Vernon. “Report from the ‘What is Publishing?’(1) Workgroup.” Open Scholarship Initiative Proceedings 1, 2016.