By participating in Switch OER, you gain numerous advantages:

• Enhanced national and international visibility of your university's teaching.
• The OER repository ensures quality, as only materials from participating universities are uploaded and published according to established workflows.
• Potential integration with learning management systems like Moodle or other LMS.
• Elaborately produced teaching materials (e.g., for MOOCs) can be made accessible to a wider audience without login requirements.
• Standardised metadata allows integration into international OER search portals and improved discoverability in search engines.
• Participation in the Switch Working Group grants a say in the platform's development.
• OER supports lifelong learning and provides free access to high-quality teaching materials for everyone (SDG 4). It can also help reduce budgets for universities and students.

The platform is operated by Switch. Switch is a Swiss foundation that has been managing the Swiss Academic Network for universities since 1987. Central aspects of the foundation's mission are enabling and continuously expanding a secure and connected research and education infrastructure in Switzerland.

The following universities are participants of the platform and publish materials on Switch OER: 

The costs are scaled according to the size of the university. For information on costs for your university, please contact oer-support@switch.ch at any time.

The underlying software is the open-source solution edu-sharing. The repository is operated by Metaventis GmbH in Weimar, Germany.

The data is hosted by GWDG. The hosting location is in Germany at the University of Göttingen. Data protection in accordance with Art. 6 para. 1 is guaranteed at the hosting location.

Each participating university appoints at least one contact person for the platform who:

1. Provides first-level support for the teachers and users of the platform at the university.
2. Conducts an editorial review of the submitted OER.

This person supports members of the university with general questions about Switch OER and the upload process and, if necessary, organises information events and training courses. The contact person is registered as an administrator on the edu-sharing platform and has extended permissions to publish and delete records. An editorial review of all materials on Switch OER is mandatory for all participating universities.

University representatives have the opportunity to participate in the Switch Working Group, where the portal is jointly developed. In the Working Group, training materials for the platform can be exchanged. Additionally, there is the potential for exchange and networking on the topic of OER at universities in general.