Archive of Our Own ^beta

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Gloria L, who volunteers as a Tag Wrangling supervisor.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I’m one of the supervisors for the Tag Wrangling committee. We wrangle tags and tag wranglers, lol. Joke aside, we are responsible for inducting, advising and assisting/supporting our shiny Tag Wrangling volunteers and maintaining our guidelines and tutorials. It’s also our job to communicate with and help other OTW committees on matters related to tagging: for example, contacting tag wranglers and helping answer Support requests related to tag wrangling; doing tag mapping for Open Doors requests to help them import works from other archives/fan-sites with appropriate tags; helping AD&T on testing tag wrangling related features and so on. ;D

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

It depends on whether we’re recruiting.

When we’re not recruiting, I do lots of tasks on Friday and the weekend. As a supervisor I focus on administrative tasks, like handling hiatus/retirement requests from tag wranglers and doing check-ins for new wranglers to make sure they’re on the right track in training, or for returning wranglers to make sure everything is fine.

We usually do four rounds of recruiting in a year, but we have cut it to three now. When recruitment is coming, I do the tasks whenever I have free time to help the team to recruit and induct new wranglers.

I also help the Support committee with tickets related to tag wrangling when other tasks are not too urgent. Recently I’m learning to do the tag mapping for Open Doors requests. :D

What made you decide to volunteer?

I have done some volunteer work in fan communities, but I hadn’t thought about volunteering for OTW at first. In fact, I had no idea what the OTW was and what was the relationship between the OTW and AO3. Besides, English is not my mother tongue.

Back in 2019, I noticed that the Tag Wrangling committee was specifically recruiting Chinese-speaking volunteers, so I decided to give it a try. Luckily, Tag Wrangling said yes to me. As time goes on volunteering, I know more and more about AO3 and OTW, and I learned lots of things that I hadn’t learned from real life. I'm more than happy that I’m part of it. :-)

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

The communication. Our volunteer pool contains people from all over the world, and not everybody speaks English as their first language. Also, unlike English, my first language is a high-context language, and I lived many years in a high-context cultural environment, not to mention other cultural differences. Sometimes I’m worried that I step on others’ toes, and sometimes I’m not that straightforward, which makes people confused. I have to say, being an OTW volunteer and supervisor has honed my communication skills on and off work :D

What fannish things do you like to do?

Enjoying fanworks and reviewing the canon when I found something new in fanworks. I do write some fanfics, but most of them are short one-shots. Hope I can write a longer fic one day XD

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) Board of Directors regrets to announce that Heather McGuire has resigned from her role as a Director. Heather was elected to her seat in 2022 and her resignation is effective as of the 21st of May 2023. Her seat will be filled in the upcoming election.

We would like to thank Heather for her service as a member of the Board and for her years as an OTW volunteer. We wish her all the best in her future endeavors.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive, a Stargate Atlantis fanfiction archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).

In this post:

• A bit of background explanation
• What this means for creators who had work(s) on Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive
• And what to do if you still have questions

Background explanation

Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive was a Stargate Atlantis fanfiction archive founded by Purpleyin and run with the help of 11nine73. Until 2014 the archive was hosted at the address www.mcweir.com, when the founder could not maintain it anymore and the site went down. In order to preserve the works archived in the Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive and keep them available for the fandom, Purpleyin decided to move the archive to the AO3 as part of the Open Doors project.

The purpose of the Open Doors Committee’s Online Archive Rescue Project is to assist moderators of archives to incorporate the fanworks from those archives into the Archive of Our Own. Open Doors works with moderators to import their archives when the moderators lack the funds, time, or other resources to continue to maintain their archives independently. It is extremely important to Open Doors that we work in collaboration with moderators who want to import their archives and that we fully credit creators, giving them as much control as possible over their fanworks. Open Doors will be working with Purpleyin to import the Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the archive in its entirety, all fanfictions currently in the Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive will be hosted on the OTW's servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.

We will begin importing works from the Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive to the AO3 after June 2023. However, the import may not take place for several months or even years, depending on the size and complexity of the archive. Creators are always welcome to import their own works and add them to the collection in the meantime.

What does this mean for creators who had work(s) on the Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive?

We will send an import notification to the email address we have for each creator. We'll do our best to check for an existing copy of any works before importing. If we find a copy already on the AO3, we will invite it to the collection instead of importing it. All works archived on behalf of a creator will include their name in the byline or the summary of the work.

All imported works will be set to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly-viewable if you choose. After 30 days, all unclaimed imported works will be made visible to all visitors.

Please contact Open Doors with your the Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive pseud(s) and email address(es), if:

1. You'd like us to import your works, but you need the notification sent to a different email address than you used on the original archive.
2. You already have an AO3 account and have imported your works already yourself.
3. You’d like to import your works yourself (including if you don’t have an AO3 account yet).
4. You would NOT like your works moved to the AO3.
5. You are happy for us to preserve your works on the AO3, but would like us to remove your name.
6. You have any other questions we can help you with.

Please include the name of the archive in the subject heading of your email. If you no longer have access to the email account associated with your the Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive account, please contact Open Doors and we'll help you out. (If you've posted the works elsewhere, or have an easy way to verify that they're yours, that's great; if not, we will work with the Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive to confirm your claims.)

Please see the Open Doors Website for instructions on:

• importing your works to the AO3
• adding your works to the new collection Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive

If you still have questions...

If you have further questions, visit the Open Doors FAQ, or contact the Open Doors committee.

We'd also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

We're excited to be able to help preserve the Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive!

- The Open Doors team and Purpleyin

Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days, on May 26th, 2023. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.

Do you have skills in fundraising, customer service or graphic design? Would you like to help your fellow fans use the AO3? Are you fluent in Spanish or another language? Are you a fan studies scholar (senior PhD student or early career post-PhD)? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

We're excited to announce the opening of applications for:

• Development & Membership Graphic Designer - closing 24 May 2023 at 23:59 UTC or after 30 applications
• Development & Membership Volunteer - closing 24 May 2023 at 23:59 UTC or after 30 applications
• Support Volunteer - closing 24 May 2023 at 23:59 UTC or after 30 applications
• Support Volunteer (Spanish) - closing 24 May 2023 at 23:59 UTC or after 30 applications
• Translation News Translation Volunteer - closing 24 May 2023 at 23:59 UTC
• TWC Assistant Editor - closing 31 May 2023 at 23:59 UTC

We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don't see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

Development & Membership Graphic Designer

The Development & Membership committee (DevMem) coordinates the OTW's fundraising and membership-building activities. Our primary responsibility is coordinating our biannual fund drives, although we are also responsible for communicating with donors, exploring new fundraising opportunities, and organizing convention outreach. If you have skills or interests in creating promotional OTW graphics for our fundraisers, membership gifts, and donor communications, consider applying to join our committee!

Applications are due 24 May 2023 or after 30 applications

Development & Membership Volunteer

The Development & Membership committee (DevMem) coordinates the OTW's fundraising and membership-building activities. Our primary responsibility is coordinating our biannual fund drives, although we are also responsible for communicating with donors, exploring new fundraising opportunities, and organizing convention outreach. If you have skills or interests in fundraising, membership database management, creating promotional OTW graphics, eCommerce, or customer service, consider applying to join our committee!

Applications are due 24 May 2023 or after 30 applications

Support Volunteer

The Support team is responsible for handling the feedback and requests for assistance we receive from users of the Archive. We answer users’ questions, help to resolve problems they’re experiencing, and pass on information to and from coders, testers, tag wranglers and other teams involved with the Archive. If you enjoy helping others to learn how to use the Archive and figuring out solutions to problems, you might enjoy being a Support volunteer!

Applications are due 24 May 2023 or after 30 applications

Support Volunteer (Spanish)

The Support team is responsible for handling the feedback and requests for assistance we receive from users of the Archive. We answer users’ questions, help to resolve problems they’re experiencing, and pass on information to and from coders, testers, tag wranglers and other teams involved with the Archive. We’re currently recruiting for applicants who are fluent in both English and Spanish (we welcome all dialects!). If you are a fluent Spanish speaker who enjoys helping others to learn how to use the Archive and figuring out solutions to problems, you might enjoy being a Support volunteer!

Applications are due 24 May 2023 or after 30 applications

Translation News Translator Volunteer

Would you like to help translate OTW/AO3 news posts? We are looking for volunteers of native or near-native fluency in their target languages, who can translate or beta news posts within five-day deadlines. If you enjoy working collaboratively, if you're fluent in a language other than English, if you're passionate about the OTW and its projects, and want to help us reach more fans all around the world, working with Translation might be for you!

We particularly need people for Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Filipino, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Welsh — but help with other languages would be much appreciated.

(Please note that our Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Italian, Malay, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese teams are not accepting new members at this time.)

Applicants may be asked to translate and correct short text samples and will be invited to a chatroom interview as part of the selection process. More information about us can be found on the Translation committee page.

Applications are due 24 May 2023

TWC Assistant Editor Transformative Works and Cultures seeks 1 or 2 assistant editors as part of building a leadership pipeline for the journal and in the field more broadly. Duties Under the supervision of the editors, the assistant editors will assist with editorial review of new submissions, managing the peer review process, and communicating with authors. Estimated time commitment is approximately 1 hour per week. Qualifications

• Applicants should be senior PhD students (ABD) or early career scholars (fewer than 5 years post-PhD).
• Applicants should have a record of peer-reviewed publications.
• Applicants need not be native speakers of English but must be competent in academic prose in English.
• Previous editorial experience is appreciated but not required.

As part of our goal to support the ongoing diversification of fan studies, scholars of color and non-Western scholars are particularly encouraged to apply.

Applications are due 31 May 2023

Apply at the volunteering page!

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

With the proliferation of AI tools in recent months, many fans have voiced concerns regarding data scraping and AI-generated works, and how these developments can affect AO3. We share your concerns. We'd like to share what we've been doing to combat data scraping and what our current policies on the subject of AI are.

Data scraping and AO3 fanworks

We've put in place certain technical measures to hinder large-scale data scraping on AO3, such as rate limiting, and we're constantly monitoring our traffic for signs of abusive data collection. We do not make exceptions for researchers or those wishing to create datasets. However, we don't have a policy against responsible data collection — such as those done by academic researchers, fans backing up works to Wayback Machine or Google's search indexing. Putting systems in place that attempt to block all scraping would be difficult or impossible without also blocking legitimate uses of the site.

With that said, it is an unfortunate reality that anything that is publicly available online can be used for reasons other than its initial intended purposes. In many cases, AI data collection traffic relies on the same techniques as the legitimate use cases above.

Once we became aware that data from AO3 was being included in the Common Crawl dataset — which is used to train AI such as ChatGPT — we put code in place in December 2022 requesting Common Crawl not scrape the Archive again.

We cannot go back in time to stop data collection that already occurred, or remove AO3's content from existing datasets, as much as we may dislike that it happened. All we can do is attempt to reduce such collection in the future. The Archive's development team will continue to be on the lookout for individual scrapers collecting AO3 data, and to take action as needed.

Likewise, our Legal committee has and will continue to serve the OTW mission of protecting fanworks from legal challenge and commercial exploitation. This includes their position that users should be allowed to opt out from having their works incorporated into AI training sets, a position that they have presented to the U.S. Copyright Office. They, too, will continue to keep pace with this developing field.

What can I do to avoid data scraping?

You may want to restrict your work to Archive users only. While this will not block every potential scraper, it should provide some protection against large-scale scraping.

AI-generated works and AO3 policies

At the moment, there is nothing in our Terms of Service that prohibits fanworks that are fully or partly generated with AI tools from being posted to the AO3, if they otherwise qualify as fanworks.

Our goals as an organization include maximum inclusivity of fanworks. This means not only the best fanworks, or the most popular fanworks, but all the fanworks that we can preserve. If fans are using AI to generate fanworks, then our current position is that this is also a type of work that is within our mandate to preserve.

Depending on the circumstances, AI-generated works could violate our anti-spam policies (e.g. if a creator posts a significant number in a short time). If you're uncertain whether a work violates our Terms of Service, you may always report it to our Policy & Abuse team using the link at the bottom of any page, and they can investigate.

This statement reflects AO3’s policy at the time of writing, as we wanted to be transparent with our users about what our current stance is and what can be done – and is being done – to mitigate scraping for AI datasets. However, these policies are also under discussion internally among AO3 volunteers. If we agree on changes to these in the future, those will be announced publicly; additionally, if there are any proposed changes to the AO3 Terms of Service, they will be made available for public comment as is required of any and all changes to our Terms of Service.

We hope that this helps to make things more clear – this is a complicated situation, and we’re doing our very best to address it in a way that doesn’t compromise AO3’s principles of maximum fanwork inclusivity or legitimate uses of the site. As discussions and approaches evolve, we will keep our users updated.

I. FANLORE NEWS

Fanlore has been working on making page outlines more accessible and making guidelines and practices more visible to new editors. Accordingly, there is a new Help page, Help:Non-English Language Content, now available on Fanlore. Fans are also welcome to get assistance via the Fanlore Discord server. Fanlore held an editing chat there focused on link archiving on April 29.

II. AT THE AO3

In April, the OTW celebrated the 11 millionth fanwork being posted to AO3! Communications’ social media-only announcement of this milestone spread speedily after it dropped. Thank you to everyone who’s shown AO3 and the OTW your support this month!

Open Doors announced the import of The ARC, an archive of Primeval fanfiction, while Policy & Abuse received a little less than 2,000 tickets and Support received about 1,600 tickets in April. Meanwhile, in March, Tag Wrangling wrangled more than 440,000 tags across more than 57,000 fandoms, more than a thousand tags per active wrangler!

III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW

Finance posted the 2023 budget ahead of the April Drive. The Drive was coordinated by Development & Membership with support from Communications and Translation, who translated all Drive posts, including the budget, and related graphics into 32 languages. Thanks to the generosity of 7852 people from 71 countries, 6450 of whom chose to begin or renew an OTW membership, the OTW raised a total of US$252,343.98!

Elections was busy in April preparing for the 2023 Board of Directors election. The Election Timelineis now available on Elections’ website. Stay posted for more information in the coming months!

In April, Legal Chair Betsy Rosenblatt participated in the first of the U.S. Copyright Office listening sessions on artificial intelligence and copyright law. This listening session was a great opportunity to provide information, help frame U.S. lawmakers’ questions about future policy decisions, and learn about technology and practice so that the OTW can make its own policy decisions about how to approach questions about AI. Legal will be doing more in this area in the coming months.

The Board of Directors published the minutes for its latest meeting on March 27. They can be accessed on the Minutes page on the OTW website.

IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

From 25 March to 24 April, Volunteers & Recruiting received 109 new requests, and completed 103, leaving us with 57 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).

As of 24 April 2023, the OTW has 882 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New AO3 Documentation Volunteers: Kate G, Miki Mizuami, Mo & 2 other Editors
New Communications Volunteers: Szabo Dorottya (Fanhackers Lead) & 3 Fanhackers Volunteers
New Open Doors Volunteers: Charlie167, Phia, Teo and 6 other Import Assistants
New Translation Volunteers: Irina Gostraya (News Translator)
New Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: Amy2 (Projects Volunteer)

Departing Communications Volunteers: Szabo Dorottya (Fanhackers Volunteer role only)
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Social Media & Outreach Volunteer
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 1 Administrative Volunteer
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Rosa V, Sarah Fox, Satie, Sunshijne, Fynn, EJ Bell, nolightss, and 23 other Tag Wrangling Volunteers
Departing Translation Volunteers: Ana Gomes, Cinna_moon, Demeter, Harold Liu & 6 other Translators
Departing TWC Volunteers: 1 Copyeditor, 1 Symposium Editor
Departing Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: Amy2 (Volunteer role only), Georgia (Volunteer)

For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

The OTW Elections committee is pleased to announce that the timeline for the 2023 election for new members of the Board of Directors has been posted!

This year’s election will be held August 11-14. This means that the deadline for staff to declare their candidacy is June 16.

As usual, the election membership deadline is June 30. If you’re interested in voting, please make sure your membership is active as of that date. Please note that your donation receipt will be dated in US Eastern Time, so if your donation is listed after 19:59 on June 30, 2023 on the receipt, you won't be eligible to vote. If you are unsure whether your donation was made before the deadline, please contact our Development and Membership Committee by using the contact form on our website and selecting "Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?".

You can find out how to become a member on the Elections website, or if you’re familiar with the process, you can donate here!

If you want to know more about the election process in general, you can check out the Elections Policies.

We’re looking forward to an active election season with ample communication between candidates and voters, and we hope you’ll be a part of it. Don’t forget to follow the Elections committee on Twitter to keep up to date with the latest news!

If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact Elections.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

The Organization for Transformative Works's April membership drive is over and we are delighted to say that we are finishing with a total of US$252,343.98 raised, far exceeding our goal of US$50,000. These donations came from 7852 people in 71 countries: thank you to every single one of them, as well as to all of you who posted and shared the news about the drive!

We are particularly pleased that 6450 of donors chose to take up or renew OTW membership with their donation. The OTW would not exist without its users all around the world, and your continued support for us is our absolute pride and joy! We are so glad to know that our ongoing mission to support, protect, and provide access to the history of fanworks and fan culture continues to resonate with the people that matter most of all: the fans themselves.

If you were intending to donate or join and haven't yet done so, don't worry! The OTW accepts donations all year round and you can always choose to become a member with a donation of US$10 or more. Memberships run for one calendar year from the date of your donation, so if you donate now you'll be able to vote in the 2023 OTW Board elections, which will take place in August. And our exclusive thank-you gifts are available whenever you donate!

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.