Commercial introductory genetics textbooks are expensive for students and often don’t cover topics or recent discoveries desired by instructors. At the University of Alberta we have written an open source college/university level introductory genetic textbook titled Open Genetics Lectures (OGL). This text contains ~128,000 words organized into 41 chapters that correspond to lecture sized topics typically covered in an introductory genetics course. Topics include “DNA is the Genetic Material” through to “CRISPR-Cas9 Technology”. Each chapter includes many figures and tables that can be used in lectures, and ends with questions about its content. Sample answers are provided. Because it was written under the Creative Commons Copyright (open source), all text, figures, tables, and questions can be used without restrictive copyright concerns. The text chapters can be downloaded as Microsoft Word files or PDF format. Each chapter can be individually deleted or edited, or additional ones can be added to customize the text for any course.
All text, tables, images and questions can be accessed through an archive site:
https://dataverse.library.ualberta.ca/dvn/dv/OpenGeneticsLectures.