He was head of the Oregon Office of Degree Authorization from 1999 until March 2011. He also spent three years working for the Missouri Coordinating Board for Higher Education, four years at the University of Oregon and six years with the Oregon Community College Association.[2]
Contreras has had five books published by Oregon State University Press, including Birds of Oregon, which he co-edited, and the more personal Afield: Forty Years Birding the American West.[1]
In 2013, through his own press, Oregon Review Books, he published a collection of correspondence with poet Reginald Shepherd, Song After All: The Letters of Reginald Shepherd and Alan Contreras as a fundraiser for the University of Oregon Creative Writing department.[10]
In 2014, he released a book on C.E.S. Wood, Pursuit of Happiness: An Introduction to the Libertarian Ethos of Charles Erskine Scott Wood.[4]
In 2018, he published a collection of essays, The Captured Flame, with one detailing his friendship with author Ursula K. Le Guin.
^Contreras, Alan; Gollin, George (2009). "The Real and the Fake Degree and Diploma Mills". Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning. 41 (2). Change: The Magazine of Higher Education: 36–43. doi:10.3200/CHNG.41.2.36-43. S2CID143056713.
^Contreras, Alan (2009). Afield: Forty Years of Birding the American West. Corvallis, Oregon: Oregon State University Press. p. 119. ISBN978-0870714207.
^Contreras, Alan (2013-07-01). Song After All: The Letters of Reginald Shepherd and Alan Contreras. CraneDance Publications. ISBN978-0989384834.
