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.

Yes, absolutely. We will also gladly work with you to find some solution other than deletion that preserves your work as part of the collection in a way that makes you comfortable.

Once the Archive Of Our Own is up and running, we will be happy to help the maintainer of an existing archive to transfer the contents of their archive into the Archive Of Our Own.

Foresmutters is a bibliography and collection of some of the stories from the very earliest days of recorded slash: principally Kirk/Spock from the mid-1970s. The original maintainer of Foresmutters, Mary Ellen Curtin, was urgently looking for help to preserve and grow the collection, just as we were looking for a test case for the Open Doors project. She was willing to work with us on the Open Doors Terms of Service and to come on while they were still in a tentative state.

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.

These are still in progress and will be posted under the Open Doors project page as soon as they are ready.

There are several advantages to transferring your collection.

• Long-term preservation. Your collection will be maintained and supported even if you lose internet access, interest, or time.
• Infrastructure. The OTW is set up to bring in volunteers, 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.

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.

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.

No, not at all. In fact, we hope that other fans will use our archive software (which will be open-source and free to use and modify) to build their own archives.

We will not be policing the archive actively; someone must report a violation of the TOS to us before it is investigated. An OTW committee will be organized from volunteers to handle these reports of TOS violations. These volunteers will themselves be archive users and fans. Like all OTW committees, this group's membership will rotate on a regular basis.

Yes, absolutely.

No one (including the OTW as an organization) will be making money from the archive or its content; in fact, the opposite, because the OTW will be paying to host the archive. Advertising will not be shown. Instead, we will likely have public radio-style pledge drives to ask for support from our users. However, no donation will ever be required to use the archive or any of its tools.

Our first goal is to create a new open-source software package to 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 Archive Of Our Own is in beta as of October 2008. For information about archive policies, please see the archive Terms of Service and FAQ.