Abstract: Use of open educational resources (OER) in academia is rapidly gaining momentum; much of this activity is happening at two-year colleges, which currently provide more than 80 all-OER degree programs. Large research universities are also stimulating OER growth by providing incentives to their faculty to develop and use open materials in their courses. To maximize impact, much of this growth has centered on introductory courses which typically have the largest enrollments on campus. In Virginia, multiple consortia are working to inform and educate faculty about the existence and benefits of using OER in their classrooms. Creating OER can be especially challenging for faculty at small, private, primarily undergraduate academic institutions, who cannot easily obtain the necessary resources (financial, teaching release, etc) to create these materials. Therefore, adoption of existing open textbooks is the most straightforward way to integrate OER into a course. These are readily available for introductory science courses (such as chemistry and biology), however, there is a dearth of OER in upper-level science courses. Therefore, I am using my current sabbatical to write open access material for a majors-level genetics course. My proposed work includes three stand-alone chapters on rapidly evolving topics, that are not well covered in most undergraduate genetics textbooks; these topics include: (i.) epigenetics, (ii.) discovering genes involved in multi-factorial traits, and (iii.) ethical and social issues in the age of genomic research. Publishing this information in an open text format lends itself to being easily updated. Initially, I plan to use these chapters to supplement our traditional genetics textbook. I expect to learn aspects of OER publishing that will allow me to collaborate or even spearhead a full-length open genetics text. This presentation will provide insight into writing open text chapters to complement traditionally published textbooks.