Open Access Philosophy Books
It’s International Open Access Week.
In honor of the occasion, I invite those who have authored or edited an open access book in philosophy to share it in the comments here, with a link to where it is available.
Open Access Week is organized by SPARC, a nonprofit advocacy organization that supports open systems for research. According to them, the week
is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.
So, authors and editors, list your open access books. Reflections on the experience and effects of publishing an open access book are welcome, too.
Related: Open Access Journals in Philosophy, other posts about open access.
My book Knowledge: A Human Interest Story, was published last year with Open Book Publishers.
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0425
They have a large philosophy catalog for people to look through.
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/categories/philosophy
My book, ‘Rectifying Climate Injustice: Reparations for Loss and Damage’ (Routledge 2025) is Open Access and can be accessed here: https://garcia-portela.com/book/
My book The Problem of Evil for Atheists was published by Oxford University Press as an open-access title last year.
I have worked with both OUP and CUP, and the editors I’ve collaborated with view open access as the future of academic publishing. This year, OUP launched a competition to fund early-career scholars’ first books as open-access titles.
I self-published the logic textbook forall x back in 2005. I used a Creative Commons license, but lots of people back then either called it “open source” or didn’t understand it at all. The book has been remixed into new editions several times.
More recently, in 2022, I published my book A Philosophy of Cover Songs with Open Book Publishers. They were my first choice publisher for the project precisely because I wanted to publish open access. It’s great to see more scholarly publishers now adopting open licenses.
Happy to say that I learned introductory formal logic – despite my complete incompetence – with the significant help of forall x back in 2013 and recommend it as a teaching and quick reference resource to this day! Very grateful to Prof. Magnus and this excellent licensing.
Wow, your book for all x made me cry a couple years ago. Great book, it’s the formal logic that did it. Thanks for that
Add that review to the title page:
“Great book. … made me cry.”
It could work for a steering romance novel, an emotional drama, or a logic textbook.
I have co-authored (with Michael Messerli) an introduction (as a Cambridge Element) to preference change: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/preference-change/FB84E7A250C7262934BFC713E333223F
Rethinking Conscientious Objection in Healthcare https://global.oup.com/academic/product/rethinking-conscientious-objection-in-health-care-9780197786536
I have a free primer on political philosophy here: https://cdn.cato.org/libertarianismdotorg/books/Political_Philosophy.pdf
Apocalypse without God: Apocalyptic Thought, Ideal Politics, and the Limits of Utopian Hope (CUP): https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009037037
I published two open access books and found the experience uniformly positive:
The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025)
and
The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)
But this would not have been possible without generous open access grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
My Zoroastrianism and Contemporary Philosophy is available Open Access, either as HTML or PDF, through Cambridge University Press.
“Thinking Critically About Abortion” at http://www.AbortionArguments.com
And “Animal Ethics 101” at http://www.AnimalEthics101.com
I published an intro philosophy textbook open access:
Learning from Arguments: An Introduction to Philosophy
There was a bit of a learning curve, but it ended up not being that difficult figuring out how to format it in Word to look like an actual textbook, and to get it on Amazon for anyone who wants a hard copy.
I published a CC-BY historical survey style introduction to philosophy coursebook, Inventing Knowledge: A Global & Historical Introduction to Philosophy, earlier this year!
It’s available here:
https://sites.google.com/view/inventingknowledge/
I published The Paradox of Self-Amendment: A Study of Logic, Law, Omnipotence, and Change, Peter Lang Publishing, 1990 (on the philosophy of law). The 1990 Lang edition is not OA, but I’ve since made the text OA.
–HTML edition
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10243418
–PDF edition
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:23674879
I’ve published two other OA books, but they’re about OA itself, not philosophy.
–Open Access, MIT Press, 2012
http://bit.ly/oa-book
–Knowledge Unbound, MIT Press, 2016
http://bit.ly/ku-book
My Intro to Ethics book is still a work in progress, but it should be good to go in the next year or two
https://pressbooks.nebraska.edu/phil2030/
I am lead author and principal designer of the OpenStax Introduction to Philosophy textbook that is licensed CC-BY. I also authored several chapters. There were several additional authors worth noting. The textbook includes ancillaries such as a quiz bank and PowerPoint slides.
Latin American Immigration Ethics, published by University of Arizona Press in 2021 (co-edited by Amy Reed-Sandoval and Luis Rubén Díaz Cepeda).
Epistemic Justice in Mental Healthcare is a new book (Palgrave 2025) with contributions by philosophers, mental health researchers, psychologists, lived experience researchers, and clinical psychiatrists. Enjoy! https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-68881-2
Delusions in Context (Palgrave 2018) is open access: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-97202-2 Features four chapters, with contributions by philosophers, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and lived experience researchers. 60K accesses to date. Supported by ERC project PERFECT.
Mark McBride (2017) Basic Knowledge and Conditions on Knowledge. (Open Book Publishers)
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0104
As the link details, Chris Tucker (who disclosed his identity as a referee after the fact) endorses the book, while Robin McKenna reviews in Social Epistemology, and Arturs Logins reviews in Dialectica.
Cultural Appropriation: Wrongs and Rights (Routledge, 2025), co-authored with Jennifer M. Page
My book A Powerful Particulars View of Causation (2021) was published Open Access in the Routledge Series in Metaphysics, courtesy of a grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (aka. Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation)
My volume Nicholas of Methone, Reader of Proclus in Byzantium, co-edited with my colleagues Dragos Calma (UC Dublin) and Joshua Robinson (Dumbarton Oaks), was published open-access this last May with Brill:
https://brill.com/display/title/62088
For anyone interested in the legacy of Neoplatonism in Byzantium, as well as a picture into the world of Byzantine philosophy/theology and intellectual thought, this is a solid, ground-breaking work to check out (of course I’m a tad biased to be fair).
My book Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons: Elaborating Foucault’s Pragmatism (Routledge, 2024) is available open access.
https://www.routledge.com/Power-and-Freedom-in-the-Space-of-Reasons-Elaborating-Foucaults-Pragmatism/Tiisala/p/book/9781032671376
A generous open access grant from the Austrian Science Fund made this possible.
thanks TT passed the link along to Foucault News in case Clare missed it when it came out.
Before the post gets too old, I just want to say I’ve downloaded a copy and begun reading it. I’m digging it. It promises to be quite helpful. Thank you!
this book freed me from the rule following fly-jar TY!!
I don’t know if a dissertation counts, but the reason I never tried to get my diss to a publisher was that I felt that making it open-access would do a better job of making it available; that seems to have worked, as it’s been cited a number of times now. It’s called “Ethical Revaluation in the Thought of Śāntideva” and I think it should be of interest to anyone looking to learn about Indian or Buddhist ethics.
In case ontology engineering counts (it has logic, mereology, top level ontologies, and a few other topics): version 1.5 is open access and won an open textbook award in 2021: https://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~mkeet/OEbook/. There’s a new workbook open access as well.
My book Nontoxic: Masculinity, Allyship, and Feminist Philosophy (Palgrave 2022) was published open access and is available here:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-13071-7
Thank you Ben!
My book “Applying Reflective Equilibrium. Towards the Justification of a Precautionary Principle” is published open access with Springer: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-04333-8 Overall, the process was smooth for me, but I would not have been able to publish OA without the Swiss National Science Foundation paying the BPC.
My book The Epistemic Injustice of Genocide Denialism was published open access with Routledge (Studies in Epistemology) last year and is now also available in paperback.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003202158/epistemic-injustice-genocide-denialism-melanie-altanian
The process was peculiar because the research upon which it is based was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, which has an open access policy for all funded research and hence additionally provides generous funds for the BPCs. I would have felt really frustrated if this book weren’t as broadly accessible.
Also, shoutout to Lex Academic for their skillful editing!
Early in the pandemic, I got the copyright back of two of my CUP books and made them freely downloadable as PDFs as a small gesture in troubled times (they are also available as minimal cost print-on-demand paperbacks).
I then got the self-publishing bug and worked up three more sets of much-downloaded notes into book form. So there are now five, open access, Big Red Logic Books intended for students at various levels:
An Introduction to Formal Logic (2nd edition 2020, originally CUP)An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems (2nd edition 2013, originally CUP)Gödel Without (Too Many) Tears (2nd edition 2022)Beginning Mathematical Logic (2022)Introducing Category Theory (2nd edition 2025).
For more info about these and download links, see https://www.logicmatters.net/books.
My open-access, interactive logic textbook is still accessible here: weblogic.a2hosted.com/Logic/ .
All my academic books are open access:
Bence Nanay: Between Perception and Action. Oxford University Press, 2013, here
Bence Nanay: Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception. Oxford University Press, 2016, here
Bence Nanay: Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience. Oxford University Press, 2023, here
Dominic Lopes, Samantha Matherne, Mohan Matthen and Bence Nanay: The Geography of Taste. Oxford University Press, 2024, here
A book I wrote on normative reasons, Normative Reasons: Between Reasoning and Explanation, is published as open access by Cambridge University Press and is accessible here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/normative-reasons/E0C4B79AF84F7214083E088ED1F2DEF4
I wrote a very elementary introduction to philosophy text for my students in Queensborough Community College. It is available here to download. It is also available on Amazon for about $7.50. I am also happy to email anyone the original Word document so you can adapt it as you see fit. I can also send my syllabus with links to my slides. It is all a work in progress.