The OTW is proud to be co-sponsoring the 6th annual IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections Symposium at American University Washington College of Law on April 24, 2009. The theme of this year's symposium is Female Fan Cultures and Intellectual Property. Below please find the call for papers; abstracts are due December 19th. If you're interested in attending, the conference is free and open to the public, though registration is required.

The 2008 calendar year is almost over...which means 'tis the season for nonprofit organizations to remind their communities that if you want to deduct a contribution on your 2008 taxes, you'll need to donate by 12/31!

As you're thinking about your end-of-year contributions, we hope you'll keep the OTW in mind. You can make a one-time donation or sign up for an easy recurring donation on our website, here — and if your employer offers matching donations, you might be able to double your donation to the OTW; we're happy to help you figure that out as needed, so please let us know.

Vidding News: The OTW wants to announce its support for the EFF's proposed DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] exemption for video creators--like vidders--who rip DVDs in order to use clips for fair use remixes. Members of the Board provided the EFF with background information on the petition to the copyright office (right-click and save), which explicitly cites fan vidders as an established creative community that relies on clips from DVDs to make works that are fair use: or what the petition calls "fundamentally transformative visual works."

Below is the final section of the draft Terms of Service for the Archive of Our Own, and its accompanying FAQs. The earlier sections and their accompanying FAQs can be found on the Archive site (ToS and FAQs).

This is a work-in-progress. We're posting it to get as much feedback as possible. If there's something you don't understand, please ask. We will try to clarify, and possibly add to the FAQ. If there's something you don't like, it would be really helpful if you'd suggest alternatives.

Members of the Content Policy committee will be available to answer questions. Please remember that anonymous comments are disallowed.

Today is the last day of our donations drive. Thank you to everyone who has donated! We appreciate your support so much.

Good news: even though the drive is ending, you can keep on giving even without making a direct donation! We have a fabulous new widget to announce:

I Heart OTW Widget

This is a Firefox extension which adds our referral code when you browse on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.ca—that is, in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. (We’re working on adding this functionality in other countries too—stay tuned!)

Call for funds

Last month the OTW launched Fanlore, our wiki, which is being populated with new articles as we speak. The first issue of our journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, launched in mid-September. We have recently launched our new website, which means all OTW members can now access our news service via an RSS feed from our own blog. And the Archive of Our Own has entered limited public beta, and is filling up with stories even now! Four of our big projects have gone from dream to reality. We are so psyched about all of this, we hardly have words to express our squee!

So welcome to our October donations drive! From October 13 to October 20, we invite you to make a donation to the Organization for Transformative Works. Every little bit counts, and whether you’re able to donate $10 or $500, your support means the world to us…and enables us to do the things we do.

Want a first look at the Archive Of Our Own? Come browse!

While we're still very much a work in progress, with many of our most exciting features still in development, you can now go to http://archiveofourown.org and browse for stories!!

(Please note that this early version of the archive only works/looks right with the Firefox browser.)

(Read on for many more exciting details!)

The Webmasters are pleased to announce the launch of the new website and blog.

http://transformativeworks.org

In addition to a facelift, the website now has several spiffy new features that increase the ease-of-use of the site. The most important of these is the blog, which will be taking over from otw_news as our primary information service. It will also allow all comments to be centralized in one (non-LiveJournal) location hosted by OTW itself.

Features

We’ve been working hard to introduce a number of new features for site visitors, including multilingual options (take a look at the language switcher on the left), a new site-based OTW news blog (you’re reading it), and the ability to comment on this blog, with or without creating a site account (or you can use an OpenID).

The Wiki team is pleased to announce the launch of the beta version of Fanlore!

Fanlore - [http://fanlore.org]

Fanlore is a wiki in which fans can share knowledge and interpretations of fan communities and their histories.

All fans are welcome to add both facts and experiences of fandom to the wiki. Together we hope to build a valuable resource that will serve many different purposes within fandom over the coming years.

To register as a contributor, visit the account creation page.

You have probably already noticed the new look of the website—we’ve moved from handwritten HTML to Drupal, an open-source content management system. We know everything may not be perfect yet—so take a look around and tell us what you think! We’d really love to know if you have ideas for improvements or can point out things that work differently than you expected. A complete introduction to the new site is coming soon!