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!)

1. The OTW firmly supports the right of fans to separate fannish and nonfannish identities. Donating to the OTW and using the OTW's services, such as the archive or wiki, are entirely separate. You can donate and not use any services, or use any services without donating, or do both without linking the two. We will never link any information you give us when you donate money to any information we obtain when someone uses our services, unless a donor specifically wants us to link those two sets of information. We do hope you choose to donate to the OTW; please feel free to do so using a separate e-mail address from the address you use for any fannish activity.

Our Vision

We envision a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative and are accepted as a legitimate creative activity. We are proactive and innovative in protecting and defending our work from commercial exploitation and legal challenge. We preserve our fannish economy, values, and creative expression by protecting and nurturing our fellow fans, our work, our commentary, our history, and our identity while providing the broadest possible access to fannish activity for all fans.

Our Values

1. We value transformative fanworks and the innovative communities from which they have arisen, including media, real person fiction, anime, comics, music and vidding.

We are creating an open-source software package, OTW-Archive, which will allow fans to host their own robust, full-featured archives, which can support even an archive on a very large scale of hundreds of thousands of stories and has the social networking features to make it easier for fans to connect to one another through their work.

The OTW will use this software to provide the Archive of Our Own: a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting place for fanfiction and other transformative fanworks, where these can be sheltered by the advocacy of the OTW and take advantage of the OTW's work in articulating the case for the legality and social value of these works.

Transformative Works and Cultures is a peer-reviewed academic journal that seeks to promote scholarship on fanworks and practices. The first issue appeared on September 15, 2008.

TWC is a Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. TWC has been submitted for indexing in all major academic databases, open access directories, and services such as Google Scholar.

The OTW is committed to protecting the privacy of fans, whether they are users of our services or not. We do not allow anyone to connect fan identities and real life identities on our services against the wishes of the individual in question. Our content policy committee and focus groups are working on policies and procedures to both prevent this and minimize the damage should someone break the rules.

We'll do our best. While spam prevention will evolve along with typical spam attacks, we currently plan to require email confirmation for new account creation, and to use a CAPTCHA-style spam prevention measure for comments from non-registered users. We feel this is a good compromise that keeps signing up for an account accessible, while also protecting users from anonymous spammers.

Building the kind of archive the OTW envisions is not a simple process. We're not just setting up an archive using existing software, but building new open-source archive software that can be easily maintained and easily reused, and which can handle potentially millions of stories from hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users.

The OTW is the name of the nonprofit organization created to advocate for fandom and to house other projects such as the archive (which will be known as An Archive Of Our Own) and the academic journal.