The history of Open Access is sometimes said to begin with the arXiv server for physics at Los Alamos in 1991. From a media theory perspective, the establishment of the arXiv server is connected to the establishment of digital media in scientific communication. Some years before, printing machines were established as means to produce media for scientific communication in Europe. When printing machines were established, open access was the common standard for scientific communication, since copyright did not exist. Open access was only stopped by the introduction of copyright in Great Britain in 1710. The introduction of copyright was again motivated by a high interest in the establishment of censorship. Among other things, this censorship reduced participation, diversity and freedom in scientific debates.
The establishment of censorship by means of the printing press, in turn, created a bias among scientists to accept censorship. The creation of infrastructure for research can thus be seen as an educational activity. The objectives of this educational activity are based on values. In the context of designing an OER infrastructure for educational research, these values are related to understandings of educational science. These understandings may include definitions of science, epistemologies, practices of education, or influences from political or economic demands.
This raises questions for the definitions of educational science, epistemologies and understandings of education that are considered in the design of Open Educational Research Infrastructure. Discussing these issues can be considered as an active self-education of educational researchers. In the context at hand, self-education considerably takes place if researchers discuss research infrastructure, design the research infrastructure in the sense of designing tools for education and use the infrastructure to conduct educational research later on.
The first talk explores the issues of participation and diversity by discussing the potential of a digital media  infrastructure to make research accessible to vulnerable communities. The second talk will discuss the problem of censorship in relation to the respective media by broadening the perspective from texts to data. In the third talk, the challenge of defining educational science in the light of the media used in scientific communication it taken up by reflecting on the shift from output to process. The final paper discusses the interrelationship between educational epistemologies and media by applying the difference between profit and scientific truth.
In all lectures, proposals for the design of an infrastructure for educational research will be put up for discussion.

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