Monday 25 October marks the start of Open Access Week 2021 and this year the theme is: “It matters how we open knowledge: building structural equity”.
Head over to Open Access Australasia to peruse the program for this year. There will be a broad range of speakers and panellists featured, sure to inspire and lead to many thoughtful conversations and constructive ideas.
As a not-for-profit publisher, Sydney University Press takes a hybrid approach to open access, with some books released commercially and others in open access. We launched our Sydney Open Library platform in 2019 to host our textbooks and other OA titles.
Our OA books cover subjects across the humanities and social sciences. You can explore more by visiting the SOL website, but here are a few of our Open Access books to get your started:
Australian Politics and Policy is a customisable, open access textbook. It provides a holistic coverage of politics and policy topics for use in junior and senior university courses. With contributions from Australia’s leading politics and public-policy scholars, the textbook includes material on Australian political history and philosophy, key political institutions, Australian political sociology, public policy-making, and specialised chapters on a range of key policy domains. Each chapter was subject to anonymous and rigorous peer-review to ensure the highest standards.
In Community-Led Research: Walking New Pathways Together, researchers from a range of disciplines consider how researchers and communities can work together well. How can research be reimagined using the knowledge of First Nations peoples and other communities to ensure it remains relevant, sustainable, socially just and inclusive?
The issue of animal welfare has attracted attention in Australia in recent decades and interest in the area only continues to increase. However, the policy process remains poorly understood. Animal Welfare in Australia is the first Australian book to examine the topic systematically. Without taking a specific ethical position, Peter John Chen draws on a wide range of sources, explores the history of animal welfare in Australia, examines public opinion and media coverage of key issues, and comprehensively maps the policy domain. He shows how diverse social, ethical and economic interests interact to produce a complex and unpredictable climate.
Smoke Signals gathers 71 of Professor Simon Chapman’s authoritative, acerbic and often heretical essays from across his 40-year career. The collection is an essential guide to many key debates in contemporary public health and would be of great interest to public health students and practitioners, and provides compelling, entertaining reading for anyone interested in health policy.
Wangga, originating in the Daly region of Australia’s Top End, is one of the most prominent Indigenous genres of public dance-songs. For the Sake of a Song focuses on the songmen who created and performed the songs for their own communities and for the general public over the past 50 years.
Check out our other open access book on Sydney Open Library.