Access to Science & Scholarship: An Interview with Amy Brand of MIT Press - The Scholarly Kitchen

"It had become clear to me in my many conversations with researchers at MIT and elsewhere, that most of them did not understand the changes that were happening in journal publishing and why. For example, they knew there now various ways to publish their work open access, and they may have perceived there were differences in publishing norms from field to field, but they didn’t know how and why new business models like pay-to-publish had come about and what the larger implications were for publishing or the research enterprise.

That group decided the most useful contribution we could make was to identify open questions in need of more research, the idea being that it would be much better for the research ecosystem to have publishing policies and practices that were informed by real data and knowledge about which models work and which don’t, which produce the most transparency and equity, what different models cost and who pays — in short, what is actually best for the overall future of research. Once we had produced our initial white paper featuring a group of open questions about research publishing, we decided it would be helpful to socialize the work and broaden the conversation, which is how the NSF-funded workshop came about.

Speaking personally, I was also invested in educating faculty at MIT about how precarious the current situation is and was for non-profit journal publishing, including university presses and smaller scientific societies. That motivation got somewhat lost in the mix of our discussions and the eventual workshop, but the undercurrent remains, for example in helping grow awareness of how large commercial publishers have reaped the most benefits from open access publishing thus far...."