Research on OER will give insights in models of good practice and sustainability regarding sharing, adopting, adapting, assembling and creating OER. Albeit in the Action Plan the accent is put on the aspect of strategic advantages in terms of cost savings it is also said that evidence is needed for the benefits of OER to educators and learners e.g. enhancing quality and access to education – an innovating potential that it is also stressed by OECD. Although the U.S. based Review Project also emphasizes the point of cost efficiency it has an interesting methodological approach as it conducts a meta-analysis of a series of studies dealing with the effects of using (open) digital learning material, thereby making the evidence as broad as possible. The OER research hub in the UK elaborates the benefits and the barriers of applying OER in its research framework starting with the assumptions that benefit may be measured in financial terms but also in dimensions of quality and efficiency and that evidence can be gathered for the impact on teachers as they bring OER into the education process, and on learners who use OER but also evidence that the barriers to OER use and reuse can be addressed. The OER research hub starts with two key research hypotheses: (1) The use of OER leads to improvement in student performance and satisfaction and (2) the open aspect of OER creates different usage and adoption patterns than other online resources. These two are complemented by a set of, as is said, sub-hypotheses, and research activities are undertaken by applying a range of methodologies depending on the shape of projects that are analysed – hypotheses and methodologies will be elucidated in our talk. OER research has also been done for a long time in Germany but there are no meta-analyses so far and German researchers did not have the fortune to have an OER research centre at their disposal. But although German OER research is somewhat distributed there exists a specialized information centre for educational research that administers a literature database with high coverage of all scholarly publications. The result set of a search for “Open Educational Resources” was analyzed and clustered regarding the distribution of OER research onto several educational sectors and topics. Presenting this background the authors want to discuss what research questions and methodologies seem promising for further OER research.

2nd World OER Congress, WOERC (2017). Ljubljana OER Action Plan 2017. https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/ljubljana_oer_action_plan_2017.pdf Commonwealth of Learning (2017). Open Educational Resources: Global Report. http://hdl.handle.net/11599/2788 Hilton III, J. (2016). Open educational resources and college textbook choices: a review of research on efficacy and perceptions. In: Educational Technology Research and Development, Volume 64, Issue 4, pp 573–590. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-016-9434-9 OER Research Hub (2013). Research Framework. Report. https://oerknowledgecloud.org/sites/oerknowledgecloud.org/files/oerrh-research-framework-v1-0_final.docx Orr, D., M. Rimini, & D. Van Damme (2015). Open Educational Resources: A Catalyst for Innovation, Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing, Paris. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264247543-en