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Rh can fail, it can be taken over by others or the fundamental value and identity that characterised that embryonic stage can be lost.

One aspect of this transition is that it moves from informal to formal practice. One form this will take is the increase in policies relating to open educational practice. These can be at a national, regional, funder, institutional or departmental level and can address different aspects of practice, such as open access publishing, release of open data, academic profiles online, release of open education materials and so on.

Given this wide variation in what constitutes an open education policy, it is difficult to chart their uptake. The ROARMAP project at Southampton University records open access policies at funder, institutional and ­sub-institutional level, while Creative Commons hosts a registry of OER-related policies (Creative Commons 2013b) and the OER Research Hub (2014) maps all such policies.

The POERUP project has been examining OER policies in depth and highlights the complex nature of the field (Bacsich 2013). In the US, there are a growing number of state or school policies, but these are often targeted exclusively at the provision of open textbooks, largely with cost savings as a driving factor. This form of OER is less prevalent in Europe. In addition, there are policies which may have a strong influence on open education but which are not directly open education policies themselves. For instance, agreed systems of assessing prior learning and acknowledging informal learning would aid the adoption of OERs and MOOCs, without explicitly being OER policies.

There are two rather conflicting messages from this work, which can be seen as representative of the broader state that