by UNESCO and under the principles of the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education of 2007. The Green Paper maps more than 14 Brazilian projects, the missions of which are to provide access to free educational recourses and, in some cases, openly licensed educational resources. The analysis focuses on the projects’ legal and technical interoperability elements, as well as considering who owns the rights to the educational content that is published and distributed. Finally, it presents a set of recommendations that have subsequently been used as a basis for discussion with key government departments, such as the Ministry of Education and regional city governments, on how to redesign projects that actually intended to be OER, but may have fallen short due to legal or technical barriers. The majority of the projects considered in Rossini (2010a) failed to implement OER comprehensively, even when their mission was clearly to provide access to free and open educational resources. Sometimes, the projects exhibited technical barriers to complete fulfilment of OER potential — for example, by not allowing collaboration or by archiving materials in closed or proprietary formats. Most of the analysed projects also lacked a unified copyright management strategy or a complete understanding of open licensing, whilst some suffered from bad licensing schemes in the chain of production of such resources; this resulted in rights not flowing to government, even in cases where consultants were hired under a “work made for hire” scheme and the government thought it had the rights to use, publish and allow reuse and repurposing of the materials. Two projects worth specific mention are the Teachers Portal, developed by the Ministry of Education, and the Projetos Folhas (Folhas Project), developed by the past state government of Paraná State. The Teacher’s Portal11 is an initiative to integrate all of the online public systems that serve education at the equivalent of the K–12 level in Brazil. Its goal is to provide an environment that connects decision makers, academics, teachers and students. One key section of the Portal is the “Learning Objects Repository”, which states: “all resources published in the Teacher Portal can be downloaded — to your computer, pendrive, CD, DVD or otherwise — copied and distributed, being forbidden any for-profit use”.12 However, a brief analysis of a sample of materials showed that each had its own license terms. Some had “all rights reserved” notices, others open license notices, and others a variety of Creative Commons licenses. The result was a lack of legal interoperability,13 creating a barrier to creative reuse of the repository’s content. The Folhas Project is part of a programme by the State Secretariat for Education of Paraná (SEED), focussed on training teachers from that southern Brazilian state and perfecting their research and authorship abilities. It was established in 2004, and is an effort to value teachers and involve them in the development of educational materials. The objective is to establish a daily practice of research in schools, encouraging teachers to search through available digital knowledge as well as explore the theoretical and methodological foundations of the disciplines that they teach, and then produce texts to be used in the classroom. The framework of this work is the Paraná State curriculum. Once finalised, and then verified and validated by the Educational Regional Nucleus (NRE) and the Ministry of Education, the texts, called “Folhas”, are published in the Dia-a-Dia (“Dayby-Day”) Education Portal.14 This portal provides information and materials for
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