Open (Educational) Resources in Web 2.0 Sites: Handle with Care!

Even though the number of repositories for Open Educational Resources increases continuously, people still widely use Web 2.0 social tools to share and find open contents to be used in educational settings. Slideshare, Youtube, Flickr, Prezi, Scribd, Vimeo are examples of Web 2.0 sites through which people share digital contents; they are general purpose, not focusing on any specific knowledge area, and they generally declare not to impose any specific IPR licenses for materials submitted by users. Consequently, copyright and copyleft resources co-exist in the same site. During the last 6 months, we have analyzed several web 2.0 sites widely used by people belonging to the open content community in order to answer the following questions: Do these sites suit the OER requirements? Do they provide specific support in searching materials published under open license for IPR? Do they help users to select the correct license for their submitted resource? Do the service providers guarantee and respect the users' wishes about the IPR licenses? On the other hand: do the users chose the IPR license model which really keep the submitted works open (rather than closing it)? Answers to the previous questions are reported on the paper.