Archive of Our Own ^beta

In a world…

In a world without the members and donors whose support makes its work possible, the OTW could not exist. And if the OTW could not exist, the projects it's been carrying out for the past eight years would not be supporting fans, fanworks, and fandom right now and into the future.

Support the OTW now!

Without the OTW, first and foremost, there would be no Archive of Our Own. The AO3 is one of the two largest fanwork archives on the web, and it's the only one whose only constraint on fanworks is that they not violate U.S. law. The AO3 is the only fanwork archive with a dedicated legal team backing it up to protect its fanworks against takedown requests, because the OTW has made it clear that it believes fanworks are transformative works, and transformative works are entirely legal.

Without the OTW, that legal team that responds to takedown requests on the Archive would never have been assembled, and all the other legal advocacy work it's done would never have happened. The OTW's Legal team has applied for DMCA exemptions for vidding practices from the U.S. Copyright Office. They've spearheaded working with organizations whose interests overlap with OTW's to defend user rights and advocate for copyright reform around the world. They've helped people testify about fandom and fanworks to the U.S. Congress--and that was all just this year!

Without the OTW, dozens of at-risk fandom archives would have faded into the oblivion of link rot, accessible only to people who know about the Wayback Machine, if those sites were ever included in it. Thanks to the OTW's Open Doors committee, at-risk fan archives from the earliest days of the internet and forward have been able to move to the AO3, where the works they hosted will be preserved for future fans. Open Doors has also assisted many fans with donating decades of print archives to the University of Iowa's special collections.

Without the OTW, the leading journal of fan studies would not be an editorially independent, peer-reviewed, online open access journal. Transformative Works and Cultures is an innovative space in which peer-reviewed academic articles stand alongside essays by fans, and in which fandom, fans, and fanworks are treated as worthy of discussion. Equally importantly, TWC has provided a place where fan scholars have been able to tell the stories of transformative works fandoms, pushing back against their erasure from mainstream narratives about "remix culture."

Without the OTW, in short, fandom and fans would have no dedicated platform in online, legal, academic, and offline spaces. The OTW was founded in the belief that fandom and fanworks are legitimate, and that the best way to ensure they would be protected and supported was to do that work ourselves. Eight years later, that's truer than ever.

What keeps our current universe from turning into this darkest timeline in which the OTW doesn't exist? The support of our donors and members. Support the OTW's work, and donate today!

Support the OTW's work and donate today!

– Andrea Horbinski, OTW Board of Directors

Author's note: You may have heard that the OTW is doing a "drive" this week. We wanted to make sure everyone knew what this thing was all about, so if you're curious, you've come to the right place. Whatever your drive-related questions, we're here to answer them. Happy reading!

What a drive (a.k.a. a donation/membership campaign) IS:

• a semiannual, week-long fundraising event to raise money for the OTW
• a way to encourage people to become OTW members
• the time when the OTW generates about 85% of its income. (The other 15% comes from donations given during the rest of the year.)

• the reason why the OTW is able to keep working on projects like AO3, Fanlore, Open Doors, and Legal Advocacy
• the reason those projects can continue helping fans all over the world

What a drive is NOT:

• an evil plot to take over the world, one donation at a time
• a way to raise money for individual people. In fact, the OTW is a nonprofit, and every cent you donate goes directly to operations. The OTW doesn't pay any of its volunteers, staff, or Board members.

The elements that come together to create a drive:

• the OTW's Development and Membership, Translation, and Communications committees (the people writing, translating, and publishing these posts and answering your emails about donations and premiums)
• spreading the word (the posts and graphics you see, the emails you get, and the stuff we share on social media)
• premiums (the thank-you gifts you can get for donating)
• a theme. (This drive's theme is "Different Tropes for Different Folks".)
• you!

None of this would be possible without your support. Please help us meet our goal of US$175,000 by donating today!

We all have different reasons for getting into fandom, like an internet search that led us to an unexpected piece of art, a friend who showed us a favorite vid, or a parent who shared a treasured zine. Similarly, we all have different reasons for donating to the Organization for Transformative Works.

Some of us donate because we love AO3. Some of us donate because we're passionate about legal advocacy for fans. Some of us want to put our support behind preserving fan sites and fan histories through Open Doors and Fanlore. And, just as some of us are multishippers, some of us can't pick a favorite because we love all of the OTW's projects.

The good news is we don't have to pick just one project to support! The money raised during this drive will go toward continuing all of the OTW's work by funding our operating costs for the next six months, setting a strong foundation for our future in 2016.

You can help us meet our goal of US$175,000 with a one-time donation in any amount, or with a monthly recurring donation. Donations over US$50 will qualify you for a thank-you gift.

Whether you found fandom via a Google search for your favorite character, an article about remix culture on your favorite news site, or novelizations of your favorite films; whether you found the OTW through LiveJournal, Tumblr, a friend, or a family member, please join us over the next week as we celebrate the OTW and its projects with our favorite tropes.

Please join us, too, in providing the financial support needed to preserve and defend access to those fan efforts by donating to the OTW today!

Hurray! We did it! Our May 2015 membership drive is complete, and you've astounded us with your generosity.

The Organization for Transformative Works is 2,531 members stronger. Thanks to 4,193 generous fans we've raised $96,684.

If you didn't have the opportunity to become a member this time around, there's a workaround! You can donate to the OTW and become a member at any time.

Thank you to all of the volunteers who helped make this drive happen. In particular, we'd like to acknowledge the work of the Communications, Translation, and Accessibility, Design & Technology committees, without whom this wouldn't be possible.

But most of all, thank you for your continued support and patronage. OTW's projects exist and thrive because of you.

The first moves seem simple enough. A pawn pushes forward, a knight takes a hop. A fan archive is created, an academic journal publishes its first issue. But things get complicated very quickly: What strategies to use? What move to make next? Different scenarios play out on different parts of the board, and dealing with each one requires consideration and planning.

Here are some of the moves the OTW has made lately, and how you can help us make the next ones:

• The Open Doors committee has been working hard to preserve fannish archives on AO3. If you’d like to help them out, consider checking for works of yours that may have already been imported to AO3, donating materials to the Fan Culture Preservation Project, spreading the news of imports, or encouraging other users to claim their imported works.
• Fanlore has been growing steadily, and it’s about to hit two major milestones: 35,000 pages and 30,000 users! The Wiki committee has also been busy planning several upcoming events. With April Showers done, next up will be the June page-creation challenge, followed by Stub September. You can join these challenges and help make sure that our fannish history is preserved!
• The Transformative Works and Cultures March issue, Performance and Performativity in Fandom, has recently come out. The team is looking forward to their June issue, European Fans and European Fan Objects: Localization and Translation. If you’d like to get involved, TWC is always on the lookout for essay submissions.
• Legal Advocacy has been working hard in the courts as they seek renewal and expansion of the vidding exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They’ve worked with the US Commerce Department to shape the future of US copyright law, and submitted comments to several other governments regarding copyright law reform. The Legal team regularly answers questions from fans and helps them find legal representation when needed. They’ve also helped educate fans about their rights by speaking at convention panels, including one at San Diego Comic Con, and publishing posts via OTW News. You can always get in touch with them if you have any questions.

All of these projects have done amazing work, but there is still more to be done. The next move is yours. If you want to support the OTW and ensure that we can continue to preserve and protect fans and fanworks in the future, make a donation today!

A wiki. An academic journal. A fanworks archive. A legal team. These things don't seem, at first, to have much in common. But if you fit them all together, they start to form a single picture: the OTW.

In the past seven and a half years, the OTW has grown in both numbers and complexity. No longer are we one of those children's 25-piece puzzles—by now we've become one of those 25,000-piece ones that cover an entire table! When we were founded in 2007, we had just 60 people and a couple of ideas. Today, nearly 500 volunteers work together on six major projects and make the OTW the awesome, groundbreaking organization it is.

Our history is preserved online. Try checking out our announcements for the opening of AO3 and Fanlore, or one of our first newsletters!

However, storing our organizational history is merely one piece of the larger picture. Though they might seem disparate at first, our projects—AO3, Fanhackers, Fanlore, Legal Advocacy, Open Doors, and Transformative Works and Cultures—work together on many facets of a single goal: preservation. Whether via hosting fanworks, explorations of fan history, digital and physical preservation, or advocacy for the right of fans to keep creating, this organization is committed to preserving and protecting fan culture for years to come.

This is where you come in. We can’t keep all the puzzle pieces together without the support of fans who love and appreciate the OTW’s many projects. If you support what we do, if you’d like a chance to contribute to this fabulous fandom puzzle, if you want to sustain our mission and our growth for years to come, consider making a donation today.

The Archive of Our Own is a labor of love that has become an integral part of fannish life for many of us. But how much do you really know about AO3, its background and its inner workings?

Did you know…

…that the name “Archive of Our Own” is a reference to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own?

…that AO3 was named one of Time magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2013?

…that since its launch into Open Beta in November 2009, AO3 has grown nonstop? In February of last year, we reached an incredible one million fanworks!

…that Alternate Universe is the most frequently used tag on AO3?

…that the Archive’s main development team (the Accessibility, Design & Technology committee) consists of eleven volunteers, nine of whom are women? This makes AO3 one of the very few majority-female open source projects on the web!

…that the category icons use astronomical symbols to represent different types of works? Venus for F/F, Mars for M/M, the Sun for Gen, and Uranus for Other?

…that AO3 is made possible by fans like you?

We rely on the combined expertise and hard work of our volunteers to maintain AO3 and keep it accessible to fans from all over the globe. In total, almost 500 volunteers work on Organization for Transformative Works projects, including AO3, Open Doors, Legal Advocacy, Fanlore, and Transformative Works and Cultures.

The existence of this Archive is a reminder of how powerful fandom can be. Thank you for being part of this amazing project and helping to make it what it is. If you would like to help support Archive of Our Own, please consider making a donation today.

Every year, the OTW’s expenses increase. Watching the trends as we grow and change is always an adventure, and fitting the numbers into a budget can be as challenging as a round of Sudoku.

Here are nine quick and quirky facts about the OTW's expenses:

• 990 is the US Federal Tax return filed by the organization every year to report our income and expenses. Copies are available by request.
• US$828 was the total cost for the year to keep our main website, transformativeworks.org, up and running.
• 78% is the amount by which the OTW’s income grew in 2014, thanks in large part to the generosity of donors during the October fundraising drive.
• 6 staff members were sponsored to represent the OTW at seven conventions on two continents—staffing information tables, leading panels, and networking with fans and tech professionals.
• US$5,122.57 paid for server colocation in Europe, one of several sites where OTW servers live.
• US$412 provided a much-needed upgrade to ticketing software for both the Abuse and Support committees, which work to address problems and answer questions for AO3 users.
• US$3,456.00 came up twice in 2014—first as the total cost for two members of Accessibility, Design & Technology to attend training sessions for Elasticsearch (the search engine software that AO3 uses), and again as the cost for more than a dozen OTW volunteers to take part in communications training.
• 2 contractors worked closely with the OTW in 2014—one with Accessibility, Design & Technology and a second with the Board of Directors—for a total cost of US$2,685.00.
• 1 person's donation can make a difference.

The OTW's new expenses in 2015 will include upgrades to servers; expansion of outreach at conferences and conventions; consultants to provide additional support to AO3 and transformativeworks.org; and assistance in managing the software used for our donor database. Existing expenses will continue, including an increase of 10% in both monthly colocation fees and insurance premiums.

Every donation, large or small, helps cover the costs mentioned here and so many more, from stamps for the occasional piece of old-fashioned paper mail to providing the chat rooms in which our volunteers collaborate on and contribute to the myriad projects under the OTW umbrella. Monthly subscriptions are a great way to help cover those expenses and provide a steady stream of income in the six months between our two annual fundraising efforts.

Once again proving that 1 person's donation can make a difference, this drive we have a generous matching gift opportunity. We currently have 350 generous donors who support the OTW through recurring donations. If we can increase that to 400 donors, an anonymous donor will donate US$3,600! These recurring contributions can also count towards a premium. Any total donation over US$50 is eligible to receive a donor premium gift.

Come join us as we face new challenges this year. Make a donation and help us become bigger and even better in 2015.