The goal of this work is to investigate how content for elearning can be authored and published in a distributed fashion: this includes the management of links between content pieces and their metadata items as well as the evolution of both of these items. We investigate the notion of derivative works, which appears to be an alternative to verbatim or copy-and-paste reusability by overlaying local content over remote content. Our investigations take place under the light of the authoring experience gained with the ActiveMath [3] and iHelp Courses [4] learning environments, and we propose solutions to work with these systems.