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Open educational resources are not available "as such". Their provision relies on a technological infrastructure of related services that can be described as an informational ecosystem. A closed informational ecosystem keeps educational resources within its boundary. An open informational ecosystem relies on the concurrence of independent stakeholders that jointly provide (meta-) information also beyond its boundaries. Mechanisms of open informational ecosystems are described and how they contribute to the delivery of educational resources and to opening education. The paper describes the case of the German Bildungsserver that aims at establishing a federated network of providers of open and closed educational resources. It points out that the design of (inter-)national informational ecosystems has a major influence on the future of open educational resources in education.Educational resources are not just available to learners. Their production and provision relies on several elements in a chain that accomplishes the delivery to a learner. A book, for example, is not just handed from the author to the reader; the delivery relies (at least) on a publisher, production facilities with a printing plant, a distributor and a bookstore. In the digital age, this complex value creation chain is challenged. But it would be naïve to think that when a teacher puts a resource "on the web" for others' there are no intermediary entities -private or public institutions -that eventually are responsible for making this resource retrievable on the net. Now, the production chain is less visible and the processing is experienced as seamless but from a larger view the network behind the network decides, for example, if and how these resources will be found by others, if and how they interconnect with other resources and services, how they eventually reach a class and how changes or enhancements to an (open) resource will be traced back. Therefore, the discussion about open educational resources and open education sometimes oversees the relevance of these intermediary services and how they operate.

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Teaching and learning in school essentially relies on analogous and digital media, artefacts and tools of all kinds. They are supported and provided by various players. The role of these players for providing learning infrastructures and the interaction between them are discussed in the following paper. Increasingly, Open Educational Resources (OER) become available and the question arises how the interaction between these players is impacted. On the one hand, some players implement closed informational ecosystems that might provide a rich and coherent environment for learning, but also lock the users into a defined and often restricted environment. On the other hand, other players are interested in developing an infrastructure that supports open learning without the boundaries of closed informational ecosystems. Such open informational ecosystems must provide interconnections to numerous, in principal, unlimited number of platforms for learning contents. In the context of the project «Edutags» a reference platform is being implemented by way in which the contents of various providers are being connected and enriched through user-generated tags, commentaries and evaluations. The discussion points out that such an independent reference platform, operated separately from content platforms, must be considered as an important element in an open and truly distributed infrastructure for learning resources. Hence, we do not only need open educational resources to support open learning, we also need to establish an open informational ecosystem that supports such approaches.