Amy Brand

Amy Brand (born October 20, 1962) is an American academic.

She moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1985 for graduate school, and has lived mainly in the Boston area since.

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.

Brand was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia 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 joined the MIT Press as a cognitive science editor for Bradford Books, MIT Press' cognitive science imprint.

She was instrumental in developing CogNet, MIT Press's 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 she joined 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.

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.

Amy Brand grew up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she attended Barnard College.

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.

Brand currently serves on boards of several information and media organizations, including the International Science Council, Creative Commons, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Coolidge Corner Theater Foundation.

She is on the Research Data and Information Committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

She previously served on the Board on International Scientific Organizations of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine[8], the DuraSpace board of directors, and she chaired the academic advisory board of Altmetric, a commercial service that tracks how works of scholarship are discussed online.

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.”

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

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.

She was a founding member of the ORCID Board, and advises on a number of community initiatives in digital scholarship.

Brand was awarded the Laya Wiesner Community Award (2021) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award (2021).