Group: For Fans with Archived Fanworks

Depending on the agreement with the archivist, we may need your explicit permission to import your work at all. For most imports, your works will be imported unless you ask us not to. Please check the announcement post for the archive/zine to see whether your works will be imported automatically or not.

If you would not like your works imported, please contact Open Doors.

If you have changed email addresses since using the archive being imported, or you don’t know if we have your email address, please contact Open Doors.

We also welcome your questions if you’re unsure what you need to do or what will be happening.

Contact Open Doors with the email address registered with the archive to be imported and request a block for that address. A block on an email address will prevent the mass importer from ever importing a work associated with that address. If you no longer have access to the email address you wish to block, please include any information that can help verify your identity, including the email address/es you would like to be blocked. Please understand that in such cases, each request will be vetted carefully.

We will also honor verified requests to not import works written for a specific fandom.

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 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.

If the archive has not been imported yet, you can contact Open Doors to let us know, and we search AO3 for works before importing to try to avoid importing duplicates. However, we do sometimes miss them. If there are two copies of the same work on AO3 due to an Open Doors import, you can either:

• Delete the imported copy and add the pre-existing copy to the imported archive’s collection
• Delete the pre-existing copy on AO3

Some of our earlier archive imports set up redirect links for specific works. If you would like the redirect to point to your pre-existing copy, please contact Open Doors.

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’s collection on AO3: we will publicize this on a case-by-case basis.

• If the email address registered on the original archive is the same as the email address registered on the Archive of Our Own:
  1. You will receive an email letting you know your works have been imported and synched to your account.

• If you have access to the email address associated with the account on the original archive, you will receive an email letting you know your works have been imported and giving you the following options:
  1. 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 AO3.
  2. 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 AO3.
  3. 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 to AO3.
  4. Leave the works in the care of the archivist account. If you would like the byline with your name removed, contact Open Doors.
  5. Orphan the imported works. This leaves the works on AO3 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. (Please note: If you choose to orphan your works, you will want to check them over first and edit out any remaining identifying data.)

• If you don’t have access to the email address associated with the account on the original archive:
  1. Contact Open Doors with your account name on the original archive, any information that can help verify your identity, including the email address you used on the original archive.

When an archive is imported onto AO3, we make every effort to notify you by email.

Depending on how the work was imported, your claim email may include a direct link to create an AO3 account without adding yourself to our regular invitations queue. If you were asked to contact Open Doors with no additional links, reply to the original email or contact us by our form, and we will send you a link to create an AO3 account, circumventing 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 did not receive an email, please contact us and we will verify your identity. We will then give you a link to create your account and transfer the works to you.

You can also choose to leave your work in the hands of the archivist account if you do not want to make any edits.

You do not need to create an account to delete your works. Your claim email may contain a link to delete your work directly. If it did not, or you didn’t receive an email, please contact Open Doors and, once we’ve verified your identity, we can delete your works from AO3.

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

1. We’ll send an email to the email address registered on the imported archive if we have it to notify you of the move.
2. Depending on whether you have an AO3 account and whether you used the same email on AO3 as the original:
   • If you already have an account on the Archive of Our Own under that same email address, your works will be added to your account.
   • If you already have an account, but under a different email address, you can still claim your works. If you received a link to directly claim your work, you just need to click on that link while logged into your AO3 account. If you were asked to contact Open Doors to claim your works, you can reply to the email and let us know your AO3 account.
   • If you don’t have an account on AO3 under that email address, you will be invited to create one, and then claim your imported works and associate them with that account.
3. Your imported works will be restricted to logged-in Archive users by default until you claim them and choose whether you want them to be publicly-visible. In most cases (especially those where the original archive was open to the public and the archivist requests this) unclaimed works will default to being publicly-visible after 30 days.

When an import takes place, we make every effort to send an email 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 on our Online Archives gallery and zines in our FSHP Creators and Publishers gallery.

Before we import an archive, we’ll post an announcement on the AO3 News blog, TransformativeWorks.org blog, OTW News by Email, and OTW’s Tumblr, Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Dreamwidth and LiveJournal accounts. 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.