Open Educational Resources (OER) are frequently advocated as an educational panacea, an educational technology that can be transported and transferred, reused and revised, to address the global shortage of high-quality online material. This paper explores that scenario by looking at the factors that might promote or inhibit the transfer and re-use of OER into Asian higher education and particularly focuses on the issue of language and culture. The paper identifies culture, as the underpinning of pedagogy, as a significant and unacknowledged determinant of success and proposes culture, as calibrated by the work of Hofstede and comparable thinkers, as a possible addition to OER metadata.