There are many critical issues surrounding access, quality and costs of information and knowledge over
the Internet as well as on provision of content and learning material. As it becomes clearer that the growth
of Internet offers real opportunities for improving access and transfer of knowledge and information from
universities and colleges to a wide range of users, there is an urgent need to clarify these issues with
special focus on Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives. There is also a need to define the
technical and legal frameworks as well as business models to sustain these initiatives. That is the
background to the OECD/CERI study which aim to map the scale and scope of Open Educational
Resources initiatives in terms of their purpose, content, and funding and to clarify and analyse four main
questions: How to develop sustainable costs/benefits models for OER initiatives? What are the
intellectual property right issues linked to OER initiatives? What are the incentives and barriers for
universities and faculty staff to deliver their material to OER initiatives? How to improve access and
usefulness for the users of OER initiatives? (http://www.oecd.org/edu/oer)