The aim of this paper is to present an initiative of application of the Linked Data principles to promote data interoperability between heterogeneous OpenCourseWare (OCW) repositories and to enhance the search and discovery of contents created and shared by the universities. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a case study of how Linked Data technologies can be applied for the enhancement of open learning contents. Findings Results presented under the umbrella of OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC) and OCW-Universia consortium, as the integration and access to content from different repositories OCW and the development of a query method to access these data, reveal that Linked Data would offer a solution to filter and select semantically those open educational contents, and automatically are linked to the Linked Open Data Cloud. Originality/value The new OCW integration with Linked Data adds new features to the initial framework including improved query mechanisms and interoperability. * OCW-Universia promotes and disseminates the OCW concept in Ibero-America. Consuming and producing linked open data: the case of OpenCourseWare 3

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Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialog, knowledge sharing, and capacity building. One of the fundamental concepts of OER is "the ability to freely adapt and reuse existing pieces of knowledge." Reuse of educational resources by both individuals and organizations may have significant creative and economic benefit for the educational environment. This Special Issue editorial introduces six interesting experiences, representative of the use of OER in engineering education in important areas such as the production of open content at various scales, reuse of contents, institutional open Web site initiatives, and technological applications to support the exploitation of OER, all at different degrees of maturity. Since some readers will be unfamiliar with prior work on OER, this Special Issue also outlines the hot topics in OER and the critical factors for success when joining the Open Educational Movement. Finally, the editorial provides a set of recommendations and examples offered by the Special Issue editors from their over 6 years of experience leading a research group in semantic Web technologies applied to Open Education. A key requirement, in their opinion, is to improve the metadata interoperability between various collections of open material, so as to facilitate the discoverability and subsequent combining, remixing, or adapting OER; that is, OER data should be easily accessible to any user.

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