Difficulties with questions concerning copyright and ownership of online materials, and the fear of copyright infringement are among the main problems when it comes to offering and using OER in higher education (Harold & Rolfe, 2019; Hirsch, Baumann-Gibbon, & Rupprecht, 2016; Yawan & Ying, 2013). EconBiz (https://www.econbiz.de/) is a free search portal in economics and business studies. One of the aims of the portal is to foster research skills among students and early career researchers (ECR). When we started to provide online materials as OER we experienced these kinds of problems, especially at the micro level. Trying to offer our existing learning materials for students as OER – we met barriers and limitations in the fields of technical environments as well as on questions of re-using online materials. Thus we had some lessons learned, which we could use when building new projects, like the Academic Career Kit for ECR (https://www.econbiz.de/eb/en/research-skills/academic-career-kit/).