Conversations with Publishers: Amy Brand, MIT Press

Hedgehog & Fox

This week we have an interview with Amy Brand, who for the past four years has been director of the MIT Press. In a recent Q&A that appeared on the Scholarly Kitchen, Amy said of her role at the MIT press:

The job is a perfect fit for me because it builds on my experiences beyond publishing in academic science, university administration and research startups.

In our conversation, we talk about the changes Amy has made at the press and how she sees them against the wider context of the publishing and scholarly landscape. Amy's appointment in 2015, in fact, marked a return to the MIT press, as she'd been their executive editor in cognitive science and linguistics from 1994 to 2000. Between those appointments, Amy's career included a number of years at Harvard University, first as program manager of the Office for Scholarly Communication and then as assistant provost for faculty appointments and information.

When I spoke to Amy on the phone, I began by remarking that I'd noticed she was producing a documentary, so she was clearly interested in a wide range of ways of presenting knowledge beyond the traditional university press categories.

Amy Brand

Very, very much so. You know, that dates back to the experience I had as an editor at the MIT press in the '90s. The director of the press at the time, Frank Urbanowski, was, I would say, ahead of his time in terms of thinking about the potential for digital media in relation to scholarship. We were one of the first presses – along with Columbia University Press – to begin to really invest in online communities and specific subject areas. For us, it was cognitive science, which was my area as a PhD and also as an editor; for Columbia was political science. And I became fascinated with how we could translate the work that was going on in the academy for a broad audience and build in opportunities for immersion beyond your typical journal article or monograph in terms of the genre of the information. So that set me down that path. I had been an acquisitions editor here for about seven years before I left in 1999/2000 and that experience is what led me away from MIT initially, because I became so interested in digital publishing.

Hedgehog & Fox

Going all the way back to undergraduate work, you studied linguistics. Am I reading too much into it to see that interest in deep structures and connections that that linguists are involved in as something that's a thread running through your interests subsequently?

Amy Brand

Not at all. I think that I've very much stayed true to this interest in how language conveys information, how the mind structures language. And I see what university presses do and what publishers do is about that very path from text to knowledge. And so I see a great deal of continuity between my earlier interests and what I do now.

Hedgehog & Fox

But unlike some directors of university presses, you stepped outside the university press world. You were for a number of years an assistant provost at Harvard University. So I guess there must have come a point where you had to decide, do I want to step back into the university press world? Or, given that there are lots of questions about what his future holds, you might have decided, no, there are other areas that will absorb and retain my interest outside that world. But you made the conscious, very specific decision to come back.

Amy Brand

Yes. You know, I again see a lot of continuity in that. The Harvard story is a little bit different. What happened was, I left the MIT Press where I'd been an editor. I went to work at Crossref, which I am is an organization I'm still very involved in as a board member. And I feel very strongly about how it's transformed scholarly information. But when I was working at Crossref, that was sort of the start of the open access fervour. And a friend of mine, someone that I had known for my academic days, who was a professor at Harvard, reached out and said, ‘I'm starting this office for scholarly communication.’ That's when I left Crossref to go help start up the office for scholarly communication at Harvard. And it was when I was in that role that I began to see that there's really this fascinating connection between publishing and academic careers and access to information. And in some respects, the Harvard job was kind of shaped around my interest because it wasn't just straightforward academic administration. It was, ‘how do people present or narrate their contribution to scholarship, to new knowledge, and how does that impact their careers?’ And so it was very relevant to my whole set of interest in that space; it wasn't as much of a departure as people think. Now, it was very different work environment from working in the university press.

Hedgehog & Fox

So what was it like, Amy, coming back to MIT after having been away for a number of years? Did it feel familiar or had everything changed?

Amy Brand

I'll never forget when I first came in to meet with staff before I started here. Now, the position I left to come back to the MIT Press was literally a block away. It was down the street on First Street in Cambridge. This was the US offices of Digital Science, which is part of Nature Macmillan. And I was actually running the US office for Digital Science. So I walked down the street because I'd just been hired, and the outgoing director said, ‘I really want you to meet with all the staff.’ And I come back into the large conference room here and the majority of the people were the same people that I had worked in the ‘90s. Yes, there were some new faces, but it really was like coming home to my second family and I've certainly felt that way since I've been here. It's just over four years as director. So it's a homecoming in many respects. It's not just the Press, it's MIT and MIT's culture, which is very different from Harvard's culture. And it's a focus around the Press – but I think was there when I was here as an editor too – which is, this isn't just about complacently doing what we've always done. It's about constantly rethinking what kind of publishing is best for universities and for MIT in particular.

Hedgehog & Fox

And when you became director in 2015, you consciously gave yourself six months, I think, in order to produce a five-year plan for the Press's future. I'm sure there are many, many aspects to that, but can you maybe summarize how you set about that task?

Amy Brand

Well, yeah. It was very conscious. It was not, I think, imposed on me. It maybe came a little bit from the mindset that I had had managing at Harvard a lot of complex projects, where I had learned about agile project management and things like that. But it meant that in order to be able to produce this thing that I wanted to produce, that I had to spend a lot of time meeting with and listening to people at the Press and also on campus. And so that was extremely valuable. And it also was an incredibly valuable team-building exercise for my senior staff, the folks that report to me directly, because it was very much a joint effort. Every member of the senior team had a part in producing that report and those recommendations. And then we brought them up to the provost. It gave us a roadmap for the way forward. I mean, when we're when we're sitting there thinking, is this consistent with what we said we wanted to do? It's very valuable to be able to check back. We had emerged with a list of eight strategic priorities at the time and it's been very helpful.

Now, I would say four years in – it was a five-year plan – it's outlived its usefulness, in part because we surpassed our financial objectives. And so we've already reached where we wanted to be. But also because I learned in the process that the way we had done that was not actually maximally engaging to the staff here. So they had a voice. And then this thing was delivered to them. But they weren't given the information about ‘how does what I do in my unit support those higher-level priorities?' And so now we're taking a different approach to strategic planning called OKRs, objectives and key results, which of course, like everything else, emerges out of Silicon Valley. But it's been a really good process for engaging staff so that there is much more local ownership over what those priorities are and what needs to be done to realize them.

Hedgehog & Fox

And again, I know this is a big question, so just tell me if it's impossible to answer succinctly, but I was thinking about that process you undertook of going out and having conversations. And I was thinking about all the constituencies that you would inevitably have been thinking about: about staff, your authors, readers, students, faculty, your parent institution. And then the wider culture, the whole economy of knowledge. So you must have had to navigate quite a sensitive course in order to boil that down into eight strategic priorities.

Amy Brand

Yeah, I would say it probably wasn't a perfect mapping between the evidence base of what I heard from all those constituents and what we ended up with. None of these things ever is, right? But I think that it was quite a process and, in addition to helping us get to those priorities, it was also an exercise in bridge building that's been extremely important in how the Press works with the rest of the university.

Part of what I've tried to do in my leadership since coming in is really take the university press and pivot it back towards the institute rather than away. It's always a difficult thing to navigate because, of course, you want to have complete editorial independence. And of course, most of our authors, at least 90 per cent of our authors, have nothing to do with MIT and shouldn't. So it's not about that. It's about how we best serve to amplify what MIT is trying to do, and its faculty are trying to do, and how we bring other voices into the mix. But we have, as a result of that strategic planning process, many new partnerships with different units, with the open learning folks, certainly with the Media Lab, with the libraries. We never had, for example, a partnership with the Sloan School of Management, which publishes a lot. Their faculty publish quite a bit, wonderful business and finance books. And now we have two series. MIT's magazine, that's quite well known, is Technology Review. They had started publishing some great books in science fiction and were looking for a partner to help distribute them, and if I wasn't doing that listening tour, I wouldn't have known that.

Hedgehog & Fox

And is that part of one of your strategic priorities that you've described as ‘opening up the black box of publishing‘, unbundling what publishers do in order to create new strategic partnerships rather than a manuscript is delivered at one end and out pops a book at the other?

Amy Brand

Yes, it definitely is. It's forming those partnerships because faculty in many cases are their own kind of publishing entity. I remember actually when I came into the office for scholarly communication at Harvard and we were starting it up and I thought, OK, the first thing I'm going to do, since this is all about helping Harvard do more open access publishing (the faculty, it had nothing to do with the Press at Harvard), I was going to do an audit of how many journals are being published at Harvard. And it turned out to be something like 60. Most of them were within departments and they were handling it themselves. And so, to me, it just seems that if you are, as we are in our case, which isn't, say, true of Princeton, we are part and parcel of MIT, we're not even a separate physical entity, no separate tax ID, we're just part of the institute, that part of our role should be to be serving those faculty who are doing that. The other thing that I should really point out is that most university presses don't publish journals. And so, of course, how we're going to look at this space is going to be coloured by the fact that we are doing both books and journal.

Hedgehog & Fox

Yes, so you have that expertise in-house to draw on. I don't know if it was the top priority only in terms of numerical order, but enhancing the trade list was something you set down as a priority. And certainly I was looking through the catalogue this morning and the trade titles come at the front and they run to about 85 pages, so it's a very rich and varied trade list that you've developed there. In those four years, has that come on greatly? If I'd looked at the catalogue from 2014, would the trade list have been significantly smaller?

Amy Brand

It would have been significantly smaller and it would have been largely focused around art and architecture. Part of the history here is that the Press had developed very, very strong expertise around trade publishing, in design and publicity and marketing and all of that, but was only applying it, or largely applying it, to one part of the list. And so it wasn't so much coming in and saying, ‘OK, I just have to reinvent the MIT Press.' It was coming in and saying, ‘We should be applying our ability to do trade books more broadly, and in particular because of my background through more on the science side and my interest in the fact that part of what I was seeing out there in the world is a much larger appetite among reading audiences for accessible science and technology information, it seemed like a good opportunity and it also was a way in which we were serving the objectives of the institute around being a science and technology (for the most part, not exclusively) university that believes in using that research and scholarship to solve problems in the world. That would be a way for us to align with that.

Hedgehog & Fox

I noted one of the titles in your current catalogue has the subtitle ‘roadmaps for the present‘ and it seemed to me that that actually was something that you were delivering on across the catalogue. You were looking at a technological, scientific issue, problem or development, but you were actually presenting books which were up to date in thinking about its real world applicability: how will this actually have an impact on people's lives? What are the things we should know about this and how should we be handling developments'?

Amy Brand

Right. And it's often a tough call. I don't know if you've heard this from other directors that you've spoken with. The line between what is a professional book and what is a trade book is sometimes quite blurry and it's something that we wrestle with constantly. We're not like a trade publishing house that puts out a truly popular treatments of this kind of topic. We are much more about books that honour the complexity of their subject, even when they are trade books.

Hedgehog & Fox

Well, I wondered, because sometimes you buy in rights, I think from UK trade houses, don't you? So I guess you're always asking yourself that question: ‘does this meet the criteria of an MIT Press trade book?’

Amy Brand

Yes, everything that we do, you know, 99.9 per cent of what we publish, is going to undergo a fairly rigorous peer review process. Sometimes the imports will not in the same way because, say if we're translating a book from French or Italian, we're not going to do big revisions in the English edition of that book. And there are reviews published and we can already get a sense of the quality of the work. Sometimes when I do a translation, I'll reach out to the press director of the original language publication to get their view. But yes, everything that we published does go through peer review and that's an extremely important and interesting part of what university presses do.

Hedgehog & Fox

And I've heard it said by some of your peers that it's something that should be made more of in the wider public forum, because it's not an impediment to publishing. It's something that gives university press publishing part of their character in their calibre.

Amy Brand

Absolutely. I think among university presses we're probably more rigorous than most in terms of the number of reviews we do at different stages. But I think the whole system is flawed. I mean, I think it served us very well and continues to serve us well, but I tend to think about peer review in the context not only of publishing, but also in terms of academic careers, tenure and promotion, grant making and review panels around that. When you have a process that's highly anonymized, yes, it can be more trustworthy, but it can also be a vehicle for amplifying bias. And I think that that's some of what we've seen around peer review. And then, of course, the other thing is it's just hard to get peer reviewers if you rely on the typical way that most of us think about getting experts to comment on research. It’s a bit cronyistic, right? You go back to the same network and people get exhausted. They're also managing a whole set of incentives around conflict of interest and things like that. I'm currently working on peer review as a research project because I really think it's an opportunity to improve how we do it.

Hedgehog & Fox

Well, we must definitely speak about that again when you publish and I'd be fascinated to talk in more detail about that. Do you have time, Amy, to acquire books? Or are you really operating at the strategic level and unable to give attention to books?

Amy Brand

You know, that has been one of the hardest things for me here because I always want to acquire books. I'm constantly meeting people and hearing about great projects. And I'd love to do it, but I don't have time. So what I do is go so far in a conversation and then hand off the connection or the relationship to one of my editorial colleagues. And I think it's worked out well. I don't ever want them to feel that, because I think so-and-so is interesting and the project is interesting, that therefore the director said this, so we have to publish it. It's not how it works. It's just sort of, ‘you should look at this and then it's completely in your hands'.

Hedgehog & Fox

So you get a little bit of vicarious satisfaction, but it's not quite the same as seeing it all the way through yourself?

Amy Brand

Yes. Exactly. And, you know, sometimes I'll stay a little bit more involved, especially, all of us university presses tend to do regional interest books or books that touch on our home institutions. And I tend to stay a little bit more involved in those projects.

Hedgehog & Fox

And if I said, let's take quality of content as a given, but if I said what would you like the MIT Press colophon on the spine of the book to say to a fairly sophisticated reader, a reader who is aware of colophons and what they might mean? What sort of values would you like them to associate, albeit subconsciously, with that on the spine?

Amy Brand

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that – there's word I'm searching for, I'm having a hard time finding – that means something like a little bit edgy and challenging, whatever the subject matter is. You know, I'd like to think that we're very independent. We like to foster cross-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary, anti-disciplinary work, which also raises questions for peer review because it's sometimes harder. And we want to be the best publisher in the areas in which we publish when it comes to bringing fresh new voices. What's fascinating about that is, we are a prestigious press and I want to protect that prestige, but never to the point of saying, ‘I'm going to make a decision about publishing a book based on the pedigree of the academic who's writing it'. So you'll see in our list a lot of younger voices, a lot of assistant professors, even postdocs who are writing their first book because they have a fresh perspective on what might be an entirely new field or subject matter, where they bring that kind of passion to it. I think there are some more established presses that don't tend to do that as much. We take more risks that way.

Hedgehog & Fox

If I were to ask you, Amy, what are the ‘known unknowns' that keep you awake at night or that you wake up thinking about in the morning? What's on your list?

Amy Brand

That's a really good question as well. You know, I'm constantly asking myself in the bigger decisions that I make every day, ‘Am I consistently putting the Press's interests and reputation above my personal interests and my personal reputation?' Because I hope that I am. To me is extremely important. I don't know if you saw it, I wrote a piece recently about leadership, posted it to LinkedIn: after years of reflecting about leadership, realizing that there's so much humility and being given the opportunity, to use that denigrated George Bush phrase, be the decider. And you can never do that from the position of hubris; that has to be really from ‘I don't think that I necessarily know more than you do or I'm better, I'm smarter. But I take this responsibility and I put it above myself.’ When you have a complicated web of relationships with senior administrators at the university where you work and with authors who feel like they've known you for 30 years, as many of mine have, and they want to call in a favour – you know, that kind of thing. But I do think about that a lot.

Hedgehog & Fox

Again, this is a big question, but what about the wider question about the evolution, or the revolutions, taking place in the knowledge economy and whether there's going to be a squeezed place for the university press? Is that something that keeps you awake?

Amy Brand

It's something that's top of mind for sure. I feel pretty confident in our strategy, which I think is also quite unique. Which is, again, the sort of pushing more towards trade and being successful in that space, while not sacrificing on quality and peer review and serving our authors. And at the same time, going all out into the publishing innovation space, where one can support the other.

I think it goes in both directions. So, I don't think the need for the Press is going to be obviated by library-based publishing, for example. I see a renaissance, an interest in the types of books that we publish, certainly among bookstores and booksellers and through that the sales that we're seeing. I've never really believed in certain dichotomies that people talk about, ‘well, it's gonna be all digital'. Well, no, you can have books and print continue at the same time that people are listening to audio books and reading on their Kindle. And similarly, I've never seen the dichotomy between all open or all paid. I think they can coexist very productively. And we're doing a lot of work around that now with our professional, truly scholarly monographs, around ‘what would it mean to get to the point where actually all of those books are subvented and published open access even as we continue to produce print and sell print?'

Hedgehog & Fox

This is always a tough question for people, but if I were to ask you to choose an MIT Press title that you think embodies the spirit of what we've been talking about this morning, it needn't be a bestseller, but a title that that you cherish for whatever reason, either because you published it or … Does anything come to mind?

Amy Brand

Oh, no, there's so many! It's like so many children! I'm trying to think… I'm running through these books in my mind and I can think of our bestselling book that sold 350,000 copies, and it wouldn't be that, so I'm not going to mention that. And I can think of my personal favourites, which wouldn't necessarily be representative of the whole Press. So, rather than saying the title, I can tell you about the process. I think my favourite books are often – in more recent times, because there's so many fabulous MIT Press classics and backlist titles – the ones where the process reflects intellectual engagement on the part of the editor in identifying the subject matter and matching it up with the right author. We have books where the editor's read or I have read an article in The New Yorker and I think, oh, my God, this has to be a book. When that happens, it's extremely satisfying.

Well, actually, now I think I can mention one book, a recent book, which I think speaks to a lot of what the Press is trying to do. So with the hedge that this isn't the best or most important book that the MIT Press ever published, there's a book called The Dialogues by a physicist at the University of Southern California named Clifford Johnson, which is a graphic novel treatment about the origins of the universe, using African-American drawn figures having conversations. This book has been extremely successful and I love it because I love the author. I love Clifford and I love the fact – and it's been a top seller for us – he tried to have the project agented and failed and ultimately came to the Press. And he also was very insistent about doing the drawings himself and designing it exactly the way he wanted it designed. It's brought us into a whole new market, the whole kind of Comic Con world. And we have many more graphic novel treatments in the works. But that to me represents, you know, we're moving into a bit more kind of the popularization of science, capturing new voices, capturing new genre and formats. So I think The Dialogues is a really good example of what we're trying to do now.

Hedgehog & Fox

That sounds like a very good choice; I should definitely check that out. And which other presses do you look to with particular admiration?

Amy Brand

Oh, I mean, there are so many. I had the privilege recently of being on a review committee for Duke University Press and digging in to what they're doing, and I have so much admiration for their approach to publishing in the humanities, which is quite different from what we do. We have had a very close relationship over the years with Princeton and Harvard and Yale because of our various sales consortia here and also Columbia and California, so I get kind of more of a front-view look into what those other presses are doing. And sometimes I'm a little jealous that we don't do more in history because those are books that I love to read and all of those presses do a fabulous job. I don't see us going in that direction. But I think there are so many just wonderful university presses and they each do things slightly differently. I will say, in a more competitive spirit, that I don't think anybody's as distinctive as we are!

Hedgehog & Fox

Here's a very last question, Amy. When you want to switch off from all these big questions we've been discussing today, at the end of the day or when you're on holiday, how do you switch off?

Amy Brand

That has a very easy answer for me. Certainly time with family is top. I have three kids. Two of them are out of the house now because they're older. The other thing is I have a very serious yoga practice. It's a part of my life and I find that that's probably the quickest way for me to switch off, to be able to go to that space. That's where I can reset.

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