Press director and publisher Amy Brand spoke to Slice of MIT about some of the Press’s core values
As a university press, the MIT Press prides itself on providing access to well-researched, credible scholarship and to upholding intellectual freedom—tenets that feels all the more important in our current climate. Amy Brand, director and publisher of the MIT Press, is a huge proponent of this mission. Brand recently spoke to Slice of MIT about these core values, as well as some of the initiatives currently underway at the Press to ensure that people around the world are able to access research and scholarship in a more equitable manner.
Read the conversation with Brand below, or on the Slice of MIT website.
Slice of MIT: What does the responsibility of protecting intellectual freedom look like for a university press right now?
Amy Brand: We live in a time of science denialism, book banning, and weaponized disinformation. University presses like us are a critical force because we are not constrained by market forces in the way that commercial publishers, commercial news media, and commercial internet companies are. Without worrying about shareholders or what will sell, we’re more wedded to truth and fact and curating with integrity. It’s very important for the public to be able to identify trustworthy information and the difference between unfiltered and filtered content. Everything we publish at MIT Press, even if written for a general audience, is peer reviewed.
We also aim to make the opportunity to be an author as accessible as possible to the widest range of thinkers, scholars, and intellects, and to remove some of the barriers to defining what is valid knowledge. With our strong STEM focus, the MIT Press can help to diversify those fields in terms of who we publish and the voices that we bring to bear. We’re very focused on supporting people from marginalized communities who might not otherwise have the opportunity to write books—people with different perspectives on the fields in which they do research.
Slice of MIT: How does MIT Press’s commitment to intellectual freedom and diverse voices relate to open access?
Amy Brand: The amplification of knowledge cuts across all these priorities. Open access to knowledge democratizes who can access and consume research-based content around the world. You broaden participation in science by making the scholarly record openly available.
The traditional business model for funding the publication of journals has been through library subscriptions: People who work at institutions with a means to subscribe to these journals have access, and others don’t. In any kind of economically challenged community anywhere in the world, that is an issue, and it can also be a barrier to researchers and practitioners who work in industry or privately.
Part of what we’re wrestling with as a university press community right now around open access is the model that is most dominant in replacing that subscription model is kind of “pay-to-publish.”
Slice of MIT: You wrote recently that this model isn’t the panacea some people thought it might be.
Amy Brand: It’s not. It shifts unequal access from reader to author if you as an author need to pay directly, or to be working at an institution that can pay that open-access fee. A lot of publishers have fee waiver procedures, but overall, it makes the community uncomfortable that people have to ask for special privileges in order to publish.
Slice of MIT: To address a similar challenge for scholarly books, you’ve created the Direct to Open model. What was its genesis?
Amy Brand: There have been other community-wide efforts to apply for centralized funding to do open monographs (scholarly books) but it just wasn’t efficient. To do this at scale, we came up with a model that is essentially like a collective subsidy. If we get enough institutions to commit to subsidizing the program—when they would’ve been subscribing anyway to a digital collection of books—we can flip the switch to making all monographs that year open access. Typically, for us, that’s about 80–90 scholarly books a year.
Slice of MIT: The Press released a very detailed white paper about how Direct to Open has played out so far. That certainly seems in keeping with the open-access ethos, but is it unusual to be so transparent about your business model?
Amy Brand: The university press community is very supportive and there’s a lot of joint work that happens. So I don’t think it’s unusual to go into this with a mindset that we’re going to partner with other presses. But I do think the MIT Press takes it to an extreme in terms of sharing all the details. We have an interest in serving a broader academic publishing community with that white paper, talking openly about this model and the underlying numbers: the number of books, the costs, the number of institutions we need to participate. We want to make sure that other institutions and publishers learn from this. We’d like to see the model spread and to help open more scholarship.
Slice of MIT: What do you think it is about MIT itself that leads to this openness?
Amy Brand: I think about that a lot. It’s reflected across the Institute, starting with OpenCourseWare and open learning, which has grown tremendously at the Institute, and also the leading efforts of the MIT Libraries around open-access policies, copyright education, ownership by authors. The Libraries, MIT Open Learning, and the MIT Press are a powerful trifecta representing a value that MIT holds dear, about the power of knowledge and information openly shared to be a positive force.
Slice of MIT: How can MIT alumni and other community members support the MIT Press in pursuing these priorities?
Amy Brand: This June, we are launching the MIT Press Fund for the Future to help the Press continue to push the boundaries of publishing for the public good for decades to come.