It was clear that a scholarly society needed to provide more opportunities for scholarly publishing than was offered by the HERDSA Newsletter. The first occasional publication by HERDSA was a survey of laboratory teaching produced by Dave Boud, who was working on a postgraduate program for science teachers in the Department of Applied Physics at Western Australia Institute of Technology (WAIT). Tom Kennedy was the Head of the Educational Development Unit at WAIT and was co-author of the publication. He brought the survey to the attention of HERDSA Executive who agreed to publish it as a HERDSA monograph.

	In the early 1980s HERDSA  identified a need for short, inexpensive, and easy to read guides on just one of an academic staff member's tasks and responsibilities. The first guide was published in 1984 based on the reviewing departments workshops led by Rod McDonald and Ernest Roe. Over the two years prior to publication HERDSA had organised a series of three-day workshops which were attended by senior academic and administrative staff from universities and colleges in Australia and New Zealand. The workshops were designed for senior staff who need to know something about evaluation but have never learnt about evaluation in any formal sense. They included Heads of Departments, members of promotion committees, chairs of curriculum review committees, and staff with an interest in carrying out evaluations in their own subject area. The workshops were judged to be highly successful by the funding body (*Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission), by the participants, and prompted HERDSA to disseminate the workshop materials more widely.  A second Green Guide was also launched at the 1984 conference was Up the publication road by Royce Sadler.
	The HERDSA Executive were commissioning Green Guides on topics they thought would be helpful for practising academics. The Guides continued to be conceived as complementing the workshops being run by HERDSA members. The third Green Guide was published in 1985 by Ingrid Moses based on her national project on postgraduate supervision which involved interviewing supervisors and PhD candidates. Ingrid developed a series of resources to support supervisors in discussing their expectations of the candidature. She wrote a Green Guide on supervising postgraduates as a form of outreach into the broader academic community for people who were unable to attend a workshop.
	The Executive continued to commission additional Green Guides. It was felt student writing was a big issue and after Peggy Nightingale's special issue of HERDSA News she was considered the logical person to write Improving Student Writing. Peggy wrote the Green Guide in 1986 for classroom teachers, pulling together the research literature about writing, and how students go about it. This was intended to help teachers support their students in conceptualising their work, and in utilising relevant strategies for writing an essay or research paper.
	Bob Canon had been running one of the oldest courses on lecturing when in 1992 he was asked to write a Green Guide on lecturing. Although there was some tension about HERDSA publishing tips for teachers, Bob says that a lot of teachers wanted a few tips on how to get started in teaching. Once those people got some assistance Bob says they could then take off and do incredible things in their departments and faculties.
	HERDSA Green Guides were very successful throughout the 1990s with Phil Candy calling them among the most visible and accessible of HERDSA activities in 1994. Vic Beasley was the guides coordinator and was looking at printing and distributing the Green Guides in the UK, Canada and Indonesia.

	Peggy Nightingale and Cathy Sohler published a Green Guide Considering Gender based on their presentation at the 19th Sydney Conference.
	Vic Beasley also launched the Gold Guides series in 1991 aimed at disseminating innovation, especially from practitioners working in the disciplines. The first Gold Guide was on clinical teaching by Rick Ladyshewsy.

In 2003 Allan Goody became the Occasional Publications Editor from Kym Fraser whom he had met through the Foundations Colloquium that he had set up with Jan Orrell. The Occassional Publications Editor's job was to look after the HERDSA Guide series. Kym suggested Allan become the editor and the enjoyment he got from working on the Guides was one of the reasons Allan spent close to twenty years on the Executive.

From the 2000s onwards HERDSA rarely published anything outside of the Guides series and authors looking for a publishing outlet were encouraged to write in the Guides format. Most ideas for Guides were suggested by potential writers to the editor. Occasionally Allan would approach people who were doing work he thought would make a good guide. The Executive also came up with ideas from time to time.

Many of the Guides included templates so that they could be used as a stand-alone resource for classroom teachers or by academic developers running workshops. HERDSA had also started to make reciprocal agreements with other professional associations, so some of the second editions of Guides were written in collaboration with the Society for Teaching in Higher Education.

	In 2005 Maureen Bell had written a paper for the International Journal of Academic Development on the peer observation approach she used at the University of Wollongong. This led to her being approached by the Learning and Teaching Support Network Generic Centre in the UK to write a report on what was happening in peer observation in Australia. With her case study research and her tried and tested process at Wollongong, Maureen approached Allan Goody about publishing her manual as a HERDSA Guide on peer observation partnerships in teaching. Maureen thought peer observation was the most important form of academic development and the Guide would be a useful support for academic developers to use in their programs.
	Barbara Grant was invited by Allan Goody to write a HERDSA Guide Academic Writing Retreats: A Facilitator's Guide in 2008.Bar bara had found a lot of people approaching her about the writing retreats she had been running for many years, and she would usually send them a bundle of materials to help them get started. The HERDSA Guide was Barbara's way of putting that all into a single resource and referring interested people to the publication. The Guide was a different style of writing for Barbara who tended not to write about her practice. Although there was not likely to be a big audience for the Guide, Barbara believes that writing retreats demonstrate what good academic development might look like –being collective and collegial where people actually supported each other.
	HERDSA re-introduced Occasional Publications in 2008 with a series on Higher Education Perspectives. Alison Lee, Katherine Manathunga, and Peter Kandlbinder completed the HERDSA oral history project which interviewed 10 HERDSA life members about their experiences of working in academic development in Australia. The collection captured what it was like to work at the margins of academia in a field that was often undervalued yet highly rewarding for those involved.
	Towards the end of the 2000s HERDSA Guides were continuing to sell well and Allan Goody wanted to update some of the most popular guides. He wrote to Jackie Lublin about updating Conducting tutorials who responded that she was happy to be involved but would not do the re-write herself. Kathryn Sutherland was on the Guides Editorial Committee and was happy to work with Jackie on a re-write of the Guide. Kathryn had written a tutor survival guide and a tutor handbook for her university and Allan thought these could be adapted into the Guide format. Jackie gave Kathryn free reign over editing the original Guide and it changed quite considerably which Kathryn says Jackie approved when she saw them.
	Allan Goody also approached Peggy Nightingale to develop a second version of Ingrid Moses's guide on supervising postgraduates. Having recently retired Peggy took on the writing herself, basing the guide on other people's research more than her own. She did an extensive literature review and pickED the eyes out of the good stuff to present in a way that people could find useful.  Bob Canon was also approached to rewrite Lecturing for Better Learning and he chose to collaborate with his long-time friend Christopher Knapper.
	Geoff Crisp proposed a new HERDSA Guide in 2009 on the work he had done on designing e-assignments at the University of Adelaide. Geoff wanted to reduce the 40% failure rate in first year Chemistry and started doing work around formative and diagnostic assessment that encourages learning and makes it more interesting for students to engage. Although his own experience was in Chemistry, writing the Guide forced Geoff to think about how he could make these principles relevant to all disciplines and used case studies to show what it would look like in other contexts.
	Iris Vardi wanted to write a HERDSA Guide based on her PhD research on effective feedback for student learning. Iris describes writing the Guide as a great learning experience that was not about repeating what she already knew, but a great opportunity to expand her knowledge in that area. During her research she discovered things that were useful to classroom teachers. She combined that with her work on rubrics to show how feedback could be effective in a practical way.
	In 2013 Shelda Debowski's experiences as HERDSA and ICED Presidents led her to write a HERDSA Guide about leading academic networks for people who were moving into leadership. Shelda saw that this move required skill in relationship management, leadership, governance, and making sure that coming onto a committee was a pleasurable experience for team members. She saw the Guide as giving people a rule book about how to do committees well, and how to build networks that would have some longevity. HERDSA was a partner in a group called The Network of Australasian Tertiary Associations, which had received ALTC funding to capture their learning for other groups that were just starting out. Shelda contributed her understanding of how HERDSA had built the HERDSA network.

In 2019 HERDSA converted many of its most popular publications to a digital format and made them available through Kortext, the online store of a third-party digital textbook publisher.