Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s that time of year again – time for the biannual OTW membership drive! Ever since it was founded in 2007, the Organization for Transformative Works has relied on the support of fans like you. This support comes in the form of volunteer hours as well as the incredible generosity of our donors and our members. Find out more about how your donations have contributed to our work this year by checking out our budget post and, if you’re able to, click through to donate today.

We’re excited to have a great new slate of donor thank-you gifts this year including a travel tumbler showcasing the OTW project logos and a sticker set featuring the AO3 work symbols so that you can properly label your friends, pets, and household items. Of course, our wildly popular trope cards are still available, as are a number of other exciting gifts.

These thank-you gifts start at US$40; you can also set up a recurring donation and save towards the gift of your choice. Instructions on how to set this up will be included in your donation receipt. Those of you in the U.S. might also be able to double your contribution via employer matching: contact your HR department to find out if this is an option for you.

It’s also worth remembering that a donation of US$10 or more will allow you to become a member of the OTW. OTW members receive a special social media icon and, more importantly, the right to vote for the Board of Directors — the OTW’s governing board. You have until June 30, 2023 to become a member if you would like to vote in this year’s election, which will be held in August.

While we hope that many of you will take this opportunity to donate and join the OTW, we're grateful for the support of all members of this community, in all its many forms! Whether you create, share, comment on or kudos fanworks on AO3; edit Fanlore; read Transformative Works and Cultures; or spread information from OTW Legal, you all help shape the OTW and its projects every day. We are grateful for your time, energy, and engagement!

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 ARC, a Primeval 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 The ARC
• And what to do if you still have questions

Background explanation

The ARC was a Primeval fanfiction archive founded by Purpleyin and run with the help of doylefan22, Jen, fififolle and telperion_15. Until 2014 the archive was hosted at the address www.primevalarchive.co.uk, when the founder could not maintain it anymore and the site went down. In order to preserve the works archived in The ARC 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 ARC 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 ARC will be hosted on the OTW's servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.

We will begin importing works from The ARC to the AO3 after May 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 ARC?

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 ARC 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 ARC 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 The ARC mod 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 The ARC

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 The ARC 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 ARC!

- The Open Doors team and Purpleyin

Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days, on May 12th, 2023. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.

During the last year, the OTW Finance team has continued its work of ensuring that the organization's bills are paid, tax returns filed, and standard accounting procedures met. Preparation for the 2022 audit of financial statements is currently ongoing!

The team has also been diligently working to meet the OTW's 2023 needs, and is proud to present to you this year's budget (access the 2023 budget spreadsheet for more detailed information):

2023 Expenses

Archive of Our Own (AO3)

• US$99,854.48 spent so far out of US$295,285.76 total this year, as of February 28, 2023.
• 59.4% of the OTW's expenses go towards maintaining the AO3. This includes the bulk of our server expenses—both new purchases and ongoing colocation and maintenance—website performance monitoring tools, and various systems-related licenses, as well as costs highlighted below (access all program expenses).
• This year's projected AO3 expenses also include US$74,000 to purchase new servers, as well as US$77,000 in server related equipment to increase the capacity of existing servers to handle expected site traffic growth through the year.

Open Doors

• US$2,232.86 spent so far out of US$5,526.16 total this year, as of February 28, 2023.
• Open Doors' expenses consist of hosting, backup, and domain costs for imported fanwork archives, as well as an allocated share of newly adopted OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).

Transformative Works and Cultures

• US$847.70 spent so far out of US$3,509.70 total this year, as of February 28, 2023.
• Transformative Works and Cultures' expenses are the journal's website hosting, publishing, and storage fees, as well as an allocated share of newly adopted OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).

Fanlore

• US$6,222.79 spent so far out of US$16,201.99 total this year, as of February 28, 2023.
• Fanlore's expenses are its share of allocated server hardware, maintenance and colocation costs, as well as its portion of newly adopted OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).

Legal Advocacy

• US$0.00 spent so far out of US$5,258.00 total this year, as of February 28, 2023.
• Legal's expenses consist of registration fees for conferences and hearings and funds set aside for legal filings if necessary, as well as an allocated share of newly adopted OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).

Con Outreach

• US$0.00 spent so far out of US$2,000.00 total this year, as of February 28, 2023.
• Budgeted expenses include US$1,000.00 for convention outreach activities on behalf of the OTW, which include convention tabling fees, volunteer attendance, and related presentation materials, as well as US$1,000.00 for convention giveaways (access all program expenses).

Fundraising and Development

• US$9,235.91 spent so far out of US$79,625.11 total this year, as of February 28, 2023.
• Our fundraising and development expenses consist of transaction fees charged by our third-party payment processors for each donation, thank-you gift purchases and shipping, and the tools used to host the OTW's membership database and track communications with donors and potential donors, as well as an allocated share of newly adopted OTW-wide productivity tools (access fundraising expenses).

Administration

• US$21,093.22 spent so far out of US$89,172.96 total this year, as of February 28, 2023.
• The OTW’s administrative expenses include hosting for our website, trademarks, domains, insurance, tax filing, and annual financial statement audits, as well as productivity, management, and accounting tools (access all admin expenses).

2023 Revenue

• The OTW is entirely supported by your donations—thank you for your generosity!
• We receive a significant portion of our donations each year in the April and October fundraising drives, which together will account for about 27% of our income in 2023. We also receive donations via employer matching programs, royalties, and PayPal Giving Fund, which administers donations from programs like Humble Bundle and eBay for Charity. If you'd like to support us while making purchases on those websites, please select the Organization for Transformative Works as your charity of choice!
• Thanks to your generosity in previous years, we have a healthy amount of money in our reserves, which we can use to pay for larger than usual purchases and keep on hand for legal contingencies. As mentioned previously, we plan to continue to upgrade the capacity of the Archive's servers, which significantly increases server equipment and server hosting expenses. The growth of the Archive and other projects of the OTW also requires more volunteers and administrative support, further increasing expenses. The budget spreadsheet projects a withdrawal of US$130,000 from reserves to cover the costs that exceed the amount of revenue projected to be received this year. This amount may be withdrawn as needed during the year.
• US$69,477.12 received so far (as of February 28, 2023) and US$370,320.00 projected to be received by the end of the year.

Got questions?

If you have any questions about the budget or the OTW's finances, please contact the Finance committee. We'll get back to you as soon as possible!

To download the OTW's 2023 budget in spreadsheet format, please follow this link.

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.

Are you a fan studies scholar (senior PhD students or early post-PhD career)? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

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

• 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.

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!

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 Sammie Louise, who volunteers as an AO3 Documentation chair and Support volunteer.

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

My current volunteer roles are chair of the AO3 Documentation Committee and AO3 Support Committee volunteer. So what I do primarily is help people understand how to use the AO3 site and its features directly through my support work and indirectly through writing and editing our FAQs and help documentation.

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

As a committee chair, a lot of what I do on a weekly basis is background admin type work. I meet with the other chairs every week where we discuss any short or long term projects and what we need to be doing to move those forward. I also review the documents that our volunteer editors have been working on and sometimes meet with the editors directly to address any questions. Occasionally, I have the time to work on a document myself. ;)

In AO3 Support, I unfortunately rarely have the time to take user enquiries directly, but I do spend some time helping to troubleshoot an issue or check responses other Support staff have drafted. It's important we do these checks to make sure the answers we're sending are accurate, and fully answer the person's questions.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I've been a volunteer with the OTW since April 2014. I honestly can't remember what prompted me to volunteer. I think I was invested in a particular fandom at the time, and that led me to AO3. I had spare time on my hands and wanted to help out. I joined AO3 Documentation then, and have since also worked with OTW Translation, AO3 Policy and Abuse, and now AO3 Support.

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

Hmmmmm. That's a difficult question. I guess, over such a long period of time, maintaining my motivation can sometimes be a challenge. There are a number of things that remind me why I'm here though—sometimes we'll get a message through Support that lets us know our FAQs and Tutorials have been helpful to someone, and that's motivating. (Seriously, let us know what's helped you out, you can contact us via the Technical Support and Feedback form in the footer.) Also, I'm working with a phenomenal group of people who I genuinely like, so that also helps keep me on track.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I read on AO3 a LOT. Like, an unreasonable amount of fan fiction reading is going on in my life LOL. I dabbled in writing many years ago, and that was fun and felt like a huge accomplishment. But I seem to have run out of stories to tell, so I mostly enjoy the stories others have shared. There's so much writing talent in fandom, it's inspiring.

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.

I. NEW ISSUE OF TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS AND CULTURES

On March 15, TWC announced the release of No. 39 (Trans Fandom) of the OTW’s academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures. In the words of guest editors Jennifer Duggan and Angie Fazekas in the issue’s introduction, “This special issue has sought to widen our knowledge of trans fans and fandoms, with the aim of publishing articles that center trans people. It is our hope that this focus will not only bring trans fans out of the margins of fan studies but also that the special issue will reflect the changing face of fandom, in which gender identities appear to be increasingly diverse.” To read the full issue, visit TWC’s website.

II. AT THE AO3

Open Doors announced the import of What Makes the Desert Beautiful, a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fanfiction focused on the Nick and Greg pairing, and Viggorli Secret Santa, a Lord of the Rings RPS fanfiction gift exchange focused on the Viggo Mortensen/Orlando Bloom pairing.

Policy & Abuse received a bit over 1600 tickets in March, while Support was on track to receive about 1500 tickets at the time of this writing. Meanwhile, in February, Tag Wrangling handled more than 430,000 tags across more than 56,000 fandoms - more than 900 tags per wrangler!

III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW

In March, Legal joined allies to send a letter to the U.S. Senate supporting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. They argued that Section 230 is important to empowering Internet users and provides protection for everyone, not just large corporations. The full letter is available online.

Board hosted a public meeting on March 26, including an update on the work of its Diversity Consultant Research Officer. Minutes will be available on the OTW’s website soon.

Edit: There was previously a typo on this newsletter referring to the meeting we held that month as if it would happen in May 27th instead. While we don't have a meeting on May, our next quarterly meeting will be scheduled soon and announced on OTW's social media and our meeting Discord.

Following the cutover to its new database servers, Systems reinstalled the old database servers to serve as app servers, which has improved our response times.

IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

From 25 February to 25 March, Volunteers & Recruiting received 116 new requests, and completed 99, leaving us with 61 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).

As of 25 March 2023, the OTW has 908 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Committee Chairs: Amy2 (Development & Membership), Kristina Busse (TWC)
New Communications Volunteers: Remington (Tumblr Site Moderator)
New Elections Volunteers: Jeanne & 1 other Volunteer (Team Coordinator), Cookies, MoonFlower (all Communication Specialists) & 1 other Communication Specialist
New Open Doors Volunteers: MPH (Fanzine Scan Hosting Project Volunteer)
New Support Volunteers: Paula (Chair Track Volunteer)
New Translation Volunteers: sei rosario, Vesta & 4 other Translators
New Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: Tee, whetherwoman & 3 other Volunteers, 1 Projects Volunteer

Departing AO3 Documentation Volunteers: Zintlion (Editor)
Departing Policy & Abuse Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
Departing Support Volunteers: JK13 (Volunteer)
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: 3 Tag Wranglers
Departing Translation Volunteers: Madamezou & 7 other Translators
Departing Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: 1 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.

We covered a lot of ground in these three releases, ranging from built-in user muting to a Rails update to a new preference requiring users to opt in to having their works invited to collections.

We'd like to extend a special thank you to our five new contributors: GoodGithubAccount, Hunter Ada Smith, Isabel Nunes, juro, and pinkpurpleblue!

Credits

• Coders: agenderdanvers, Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, Cesium-Ice, EchoEkhi, ellieyhc, GoodGithubAccount, Hunter Ada Smith, irrationalpie, Isabel Nunes, juro, Potpotkettle, redsummernight, salt, Sarken, ticking instant, warlockmel, weeklies
• Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, EchoEkhi, james_, redsummernight, Sarken, ticking instant
• Testers: Brian Austin, lydia-theda, Maine, makepeacelovejoy, mumble, Nat, petricores, Priscilla, redsummernight, Rhine, Runt, Sammie Louise, Sarken, Teyke

Details

0.9.336

The February 8 release included a mute button for users and password changes for site admins.

• [AO3-6365] - We've added a handy button for muting users. You can get all the details in the muting announcement.
• [AO3-6440] - Previously, when our database admins created accounts for site admins, they would set up a password for the account and then pass it along. Now admins are required to set their own passwords and allowed to reset them as well. Additionally, it's now easier for database admins to revoke and restore site admins' access.
• [AO3-6422] - We've limited the number of accounts a user can block to 2,000. (The same limit applies to muting.)
• [AO3-6451], [AO3-6463], [AO3-6468] - The httparty, Rack, and Global ID gems had security updates, so we updated them.

0.9.337

On February 19, we deployed an update to Rails.

• [AO3-6469] - We updated from Rails 6 to Rails 6.1. Now onward to Rails 7!
• [AO3-6477] - It was the Sanitize gem's turn for some security updates, so we bumped the version we're using from 6.0.0 to 6.0.1.

0.9.338

Our March 31 release added a new preference requiring users to opt-in if they'd like to allow collection moderators to invite their works to collections. It also added support for ruby annotations and the details HTML tag and included a whole lot of other bug fixes and enhancements.

Collection invitation preference

[AO3-6118] - Previously, a collection moderator could invite any work on the Archive to their collection, which would send an email to the creator asking them to approve or reject the invitation. Work creators could also choose to bypass the invitation process and allow mods to add their works to collections without needing to approve individual invitations.

This system was prone to abuse, so we have now removed the "Automatically agree to your work being collected by others in the Archive" preference and replaced it with a way to opt into or out of having your works invited to collections.

By default, no one will be allowed to invite your work to their collection. If you'd like to change this, please go to your preferences page and choose "Allow others to invite my works to collections."

If you enable this preference, you'll receive an email for each new invitation, and your work won't be added to the collection unless you approve the invitation. You can always add your own work to collections or remove your work from collections at any time, regardless of whether you enable this preference. If you're a collection moderator and you'd like to add a work whose creator hasn't enabled this preference, you can still bookmark the work and add the bookmark to your collection instead.

General enhancements

• [AO3-6183] - Live validation error messages on forms can now be read by screen readers.
• [AO3-6318] - Enabling the "Hide my work from search engines" preference will now also do its best to hide your series pages.
• [AO3-6475] - To minimize the number of trips we make to the database when a page is loaded, we've added code that will let us use the includes method on pages that use Elasticsearch.
• [AO3-5666] - We've clarified the error message you get if the username you enter is formatted incorrectly when you're creating an account or changing your username.

Changes to allowed HTML and CSS

• [AO3-6279] - We've stopped allowing video embeds from one defunct site (Metacafe) and two that no longer host fanvids (Ning and Dailymotion).
• [AO3-6319] - You can now use HSLA colors in skins.
• [AO3-6464] - You can now use the ruby, rt, and rp tags to include annotated text wherever HTML is allowed.
• [AO3-6466] - Got spoilers? Now you can hide them using the details and summary tags anywhere you can use HTML.

Bug fixes

• [AO3-6387] - If a tag wrangler created a noncanonical tag with the same name as an existing canonical tag, the existing tag would get decanonized. Now they'll get a nice error message telling them the tag already exists instead.
• [AO3-2187], [AO3-3585] - On certain forms, the submit button is disabled and replaced with a "Please wait..." message once it's pressed. Unfortunately, this made it impossible to resubmit the form if there were errors in fields validated using JavaScript: even after the errors were corrected, the submit button remained disabled. Now the button will be reenabled once all errors have been corrected, and the page will automatically scroll to the topmost error to help you find and fix any problems.
• [AO3-6428] - If you deleted all the posted chapters in your work, leaving only a draft chapter behind, deleting or downloading the work would lead to a 500 error. This happened because the code for downloads and attachments of deleted works expected that every work would have at least one posted chapter. Now downloads of zero-chapter works will produce files containing metadata but no chapter content, and attachments that are sent to a deleted work's creators will include draft chapters as well as posted ones.

Clean up on aisle five

• [AO3-5837] - We removed some unused code from the bookmarks controller.
• [AO3-6368] - We also removed some unused code known as the EmailValidator. (We have other ways of validating your email!)
• [AO3-6420] - Oh, hey, what's that? An unused view for gifts? Well, let's remove that, too.
• [AO3-6435] - It's not just unused code we've been removing -- we've also dropped an unused column (prompt_restriction_id) from two database tables.

Some real gems

• [AO3-6481] - We replaced a broken link on our DMCA Policy page.
• [AO3-6495] - We updated the Rack gem due to some security alerts.
• [AO3-6485] - The gem we previously used for uploading information about our test coverage to Codecov has been deprecated, so we've started using GitHub Actions for this instead.

Improving volunteer tools

• [AO3-6140] - We've restricted which admins can edit locales and languages and removed an unused role previously planned for users on our translation team.
• [AO3-6425] - We limit how many abuse reports we'll accept for a given work, but sometimes those limits weren't being applied due to missing information in the reported URL. We've tweaked the code so these URLs can no longer sneak past this restriction.
• [AO3-6432] - The account we use for orphaned works can no longer be suspended or banned. Yeah, don't ask.
• [AO3-5521] - To help combat abuse, we now temporarily store information about the creators of recently orphaned works.
• [AO3-6482] - We cache certain skins for performance reasons, and we have to create new versions of the cached files each time we deploy changes to the default site CSS. Sometimes this process would fail in a particular way that meant we couldn't just rerun it because it would no longer know which skins it needed to cache. We've changed how we specify the skins it applies to so we can rerun it more easily.

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 Jennifer Duggan, who volunteers as a copyeditor for our journal Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC).

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

I am a copyeditor for Transformative Works and Cultures (although I have taken a break this year due to changes at work). This means that I read through and correct articles to ensure that Chicago citation style and the journal style are properly followed, that grammar and mechanics are correct, and that the articles are cohesive and coherent.

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

Most weeks, I do very little, actually, but when we are working on an issue, I work quite a bit at the weekend and in the evenings. It usually takes several hours to properly copyedit an article, and we usually get assigned several articles per issue. You have to check every word, every citation, every period, every link to make sure everything is correct—the perfect pastime for someone who has a tendency to be a little obsessive!

In addition to your role as a copyeditor, you guest edited the March 2023 Transformative Works and Cultures issue on trans fandom. What was that experience like?

My coeditor, Angie, and I are still at it! It has been quite a fun experience, and I am looking forward to seeing the journal go live in a month’s time. I’ve been involved with a number of journals for over a decade now, so I knew what I was signing myself up for, but it feels really special to be guest editing a special issue on a topic that is so important to me. And it is always a pleasure working with the team at Transformative Works and Cultures—everyone is so lovely!

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

Time is definitely my biggest challenge. Sometimes, the timing of journal issues clashes with the one time in the year I can take a proper holiday (July) or exams and marking at my university (December–January, May–June). But I also feel that as I get older—or, possibly, as I settle into the country I have adopted, which places much more emphasis on work-life balance than my home country—it gets harder and harder to burn the midnight oil. (That could just be the tail end of winter talking, though.)

What fannish things do you like to do?

I am an unabashed lurker. I lurk and lurk and lurk. This is because I was kicked off my favorite fan site for being underaged when I was around 15, although I did point out to the site managers that I was above the age of sexual majority where I lived and that it was therefore ridiculous that they felt I shouldn’t read anything even vaguely sexual, since it was perfectly legal for me to have sex. I may also have thrown about accusations of Americentrism, agism, and several other -isms, which I don’t think endeared me to them—and which quite obviously did not persuade them to allow me to continue to be a site member. Either way, after that happened, I stopped writing fan fiction and stopped commenting actively. (Actually, I commented for a fic for the first time in over fifteen years recently. I prefer to just lurk, though, as it feels safer.)

Also, I am an acafan, which I suppose means I am a fan of fandom: I am an academic who specializes in fandom studies, so I have dedicated my professional life to fandom. That’s a pretty fannish thing to do, isn’t it?

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.