Frequently Asked Questions

The Open Doors project of the Organization for Transformative Works is dedicated to preserving fanworks for the future. Our goal in particular is to preserve those fannish projects that might otherwise be lost due to lack of time, interest, or resources on the part of the current maintainer.

Our Terms of Service may be found in part V, section D, of the Archive of Our Own Terms of Service.

Please contact the Open Doors committee.

There are several advantages to backing up or transferring your fanworks.

• Long-term preservation. Your archive will be maintained and supported even if you lose internet access, interest, or time. Your zines will be preserved for future generations to admire and enjoy.
• Infrastructure. The OTW is set up to bring in volunteers as well as provide advice and technical help for maintaining and growing your collection or project.
• Encouraging contributions. Volunteers and contributors are more likely to invest their time and energy in a project when they have a real expectation that their work will be preserved into the future.
• Financial support in a nonprofit environment. The OTW will never exploit your work or the work of your contributors for individual profit.

While the Archive of Our Own welcomes fanworks of all kinds, our resources for supporting projects that can not be easily integrated to the Archive are limited. While we are open to talking to the maintainer of any fannish project which needs our help, we are not providing general hosting like an ISP. A special project that requires its own server space or other resources will need to be approved by the Board as a special collection before it is brought on.

The maintainer of a collection brought on under Open Doors also has to agree to the Open Doors Terms of Service.

We are happy to help the maintainers of existing archives to transfer the contents of their archives into the Archive of Our Own (AO3).

Currently, we are able to mass import archives that have been built with the Automated Archive software; an e-fiction importer is also in the works. If your archive has been built with other software, please contact us: we may be able to offer a customized solution or other help. Open Doors also assists moderators of smaller archives with manual imports.

Archives will be preserved within the AO3 using the Collections feature, and the moderator of the original archive will be invited to moderate the collection within the AO3. If the moderator no longer wishes to be involved with the archive, other arrangements can be made to assure that the archive collection is maintained.

In cases where the original archive site and address are still available, we also may be able to set up automatic redirecting from the original URLs to the new locations in the AO3, preserving existing links, but this can’t be guaranteed. We also welcome maintainers who wish to back up the contents of their archives in the AO3.

Archives that have been integrated into the Archive of Our Own will also be listed in the Open Doors gallery.

Contact Open Doors for access to the archive importer. Please let us know from the outset if you have special needs — for example, if you'd like us to take over maintenance of the old domain, or if your archive contains multimedia content.

In early 2009, Open Doors launched the Fan Culture Preservation Project in conjunction with the Special Collections Department at the University of Iowa Libraries. This project is dedicated to preserving fan artifacts such as letterzines, fanzines, and other non-digital fan works and memorabilia. Contact the Open Doors committee for more information about donating zines or other artifacts of fan culture to the Fan Culture Preservation Project.

You may not have written all the stories, but if you’re the moderator of an archive, you’ve accepted responsibility for keeping them online and accessible. We think that transferring an archive into the AO3 is along the same lines as changing web host or ISP, or installing an updated software package for the archive; it’s like a librarian moving a collection.

Yes, absolutely. See “How will I get control over my imported works?”. We will also gladly work with you to find some solution other than deletion that preserves your work as part of the archive collection in a way that makes you comfortable. As we note above, we offer the option of “orphaning” your work, which would allow the work to remain available but remove any identifying information you want removed.

Because the archivist who controls the archive you used decided to move to the AO3. While all the AO3’s tools are designed to give as much control to the individual fan as possible, in the case of large archives we believe that the archivist has responsibility and authority for the body of work as a collection. Archivists have moved archives onto different servers, updated the software that organizes the works, switched webhosting, etc. to keep a collection of fan works alive, online, and together. Transferring or backing up a collection into the AO3 is just another way of ensuring an archive’s long term accessibility. The archivist will also continue to have control over the collection if s/he wants, and can set its rules, etc. Nonetheless, if an individual fan wants to remove her or his stories from the original archive or from the AO3, we provide easy tools for doing so; see below.

Before we import an archive, we’ll post an Archive news post about the import and tweet about it on the AO3 Twitter account: @ao3org. We will also encourage the maintainers of the archive we’re importing to publicise the import on the old archive (if feasible) and in other venues where they believe affected users will see the news. Since at-risk archives are often older archives where many users have moved on and/or changed their contact details, we can’t guarantee that everyone affected will know ahead of time, but we’ll do our best to make sure people are aware.

When an import takes place, an email will be sent to every user who has had a work imported. These emails will go to the email address associated with the account on the old archive. This does mean that if you no longer have access to that email address, you won’t be notified automatically – we hope that the other publicity around imports will help ensure that those people affected will hear about it. We maintain a list of imported archives in the Open Doors Special Collections Gallery.

When your work is imported onto the AO3, several things will happen:

• We’ll send an email to the email address associated with the account on the archive that’s being imported, letting you know you can come and claim your works.
• If you already have an account on the Archive of Our Own, you’ll be able to claim the works and add them to your existing AO3 account.
• If you don’t have an account on the Archive of Our Own, you will be invited to create one, and will be able to claim your imported works and associate them with that account.
• Your imported works will be locked to logged-in Archive users by default.

When an archive is imported onto the AO3, you’ll be notified by email. If you don’t already have an account, you will be invited to create an Archive account (without adding yourself to our regular invitations queue). Yay! If you do already have an account, you’ll be able to claim the works for that account.

If you have access to the email address associated with the account on the old archive:

• You will receive an email letting you know your works have been imported and giving you the following options:
• Claim the works on the Archive of Our Own and create a new account which they will be associated with (this means you get an AO3 account if you don’t already have one). You can then edit, delete, etc, the same way you would with any work you posted on the AO3.
• Claim the imported works and associate them with your existing AO3 account. You can then edit, delete, etc, the same way you would with any work you posted on the AO3.
• Delete the imported works. If you do this, you will also have the option to prevent any future works associated with that email address being imported onto the Archive.
• Orphan the imported works. This leaves the works on the Archive, but removes them from the control of any user account. You can choose whether to remove the name they were associated with on the old archive, or leave it displaying as a pseud.
• If you don’t have access to the email address associated with the account on the old archive:
• Contact the archivist who is maintaining the new collection – contact details will be given on the profile page of the collection.
• Contact the Open Doors team.

The imported archive will be made into a collection on the Archive of Our Own, so it will remain individually distinct and can be browsed independently of the main archive. Imported works will also be accessible from the main Archive pages (so you may get some new readers!). Where possible, we will implement redirects from the original archive domain to the Archive of Our Own: we will publicise this on a case-by-case basis.

If you imported the work from the original archive using our import feature, then the work will not be imported again and your existing copy will be automatically associated with the new collection. If you posted the work manually or imported it from a different url, then you will need to decide what to do with the duplicate work. You can:

• Keep the version you posted manually and add it to the collection created for the imported archive. In this case you will wish to delete the duplicate copy.
• Delete the version you posted manually and claim the version created during the Archive import.
• Claim the imported version and choose to keep both versions (you may wish to do this if both versions of the work have comments and/or kudos, as there is no way of transferring comments from one work to another).

Our aim is to import comments and reviews, because we are keen to preserve fannish history, which includes the way people interacted with the work. However, this functionality depends on the setup of the original archive, so this will be determined on a case-by-case basis and information will be made available for each individual archive import.

Preserving fannish history is a central part of our mission – we love the plurality of fandom and want there to be many individual archives, and we want to ensure that if someone can no longer maintain an archive, this bit of fandom isn’t lost. We’d love to be able to preserve the archives themselves, but the resources required are too big: each archive would need its own server space, a team of coders able to update and/or rewrite the code behind it, some dedicated moderators, etc. By importing archives onto the AO3 but making them into distinct collections, we are able to save the wonderful fannish creativity and a little of that individual identity, while ensuring we only have to support one set of code, one lot of servers, and one support team.