FAQ – Open Doors

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. 

It is extremely important to the Organization for Transformative Works and the Archive of Our Own (AO3) that the original creators of any fan works are fully credited and have as much control over their work as possible. Open Doors has tools and standard procedures to make sure that all reasonable efforts are made to contact creators before and after their works are imported to AO3 (so that they are aware of what is happening, and have the opportunity to get in touch with us if necessary), that all creators are fully credited, and that creators always have the opportunity to claim/delete/orphan/change their works as desired.

Anyone can suggest an archive, zine, or other fan project for preservation, including archivists, moderators, publishers, creators and readers. So, if you are aware of an archive/zine that has closed or gone offline, or has an uncertain future, let us know using our contact form.

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.
• Infrastructure. The Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW) is set up to bring in volunteers as well as provide advice and technical help for maintaining and growing your collection or project.
• Financial support in a nonprofit environment. The OTW will never exploit your work or the work of your contributors for individual profit.
• Accessibility. When Open Doors imports zines, we import the text of the work to AO3, so the text is accessible.

While the Archive of Our Own (AO3) welcomes fanworks of all kinds, our resources for supporting projects that cannot be easily integrated to AO3 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.

Contact the Open Doors committee for access to the volunteers importing archives and zines to AO3. Please let us know from the outset if you have particular requirements — for example, if you’d like us to take over maintenance of the old domain, or if your online archive contains multimedia content.

What we will need from you and/or your co-mod/publishers(s):

• Commitment to working with Open Doors for at least the duration of the import.
• Participation in the outreach process.
• Agreement to follow Open Doors policies for attributing credit on imported works, providing background for the import, and helping creators claim their works.
• If the original online archive will be staying online, the ability to edit it upon creators’ request to delete works or change creator names.

If you are the publisher of a zine and want to digitally preserve your zine on AO3, see the AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project and contact Open Doors.

To preserve physical items, Open Doors partners with several institutions as part of the Fan Culture Preservation Project (FCPP). This project is dedicated to preserving fannish artifacts such as letterzines, fanzines, and other non-digital fan works and memorabilia. Please check out the FCPP website, the FCPP FAQ on this webpage, or contact the Open Doors Committee for more information.

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. And if you’re the publisher of a zine, you’ve accepted responsibility for making the works accessible. We think that transferring an archive onto 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.

We can also organize an import that requires each creator’s explicit permission before we import their works. This is most common with mailing lists and some zines.

We are happy to help the archive maintainers to transfer the contents of their archives or zines into the Archive of Our Own (AO3)! We would create a collection on AO3 for your archive and a special archivist account that can upload works on behalf of others. As the mod(s) of the original archive, you would be invited to moderate the collection within AO3.

We can help you with procedures to do the bulk of the importing yourself, or we have a team of import assistants that can help with the manual work. We can provide support in:

• Outreach: publicizing the import using OTW’s media channels and fielding questions
• Procedures: provide tools that automate sending invitations (as many as you need) and e-mails that allow creators to claim their works, assistance tracking works to be imported, instructions, and help with AO3 questions (e.g., collections, tagging, etc.)
• Technical Support: if desired, we can assist with creating backups and/or setting up redirects to the Open Doors collection. We may also be able to generate spreadsheets for database driven archives and mass import archives to AO3
• Manual Assistance: We have a team of import assistants that can help create spreadsheets and manually import works to AO3

During the import, we will depend on you and/or volunteers designated by you for:

• Providing feedback on drafts and AO3 tag suggestions
• Publicizing the import to archive members (e.g. by e-mail, posts to related communities, etc.)
• Optionally, creating spreadsheets and importing works

If, after the import, you no longer wish to be involved with the archive, you can designate a new maintainer for the collection or close the collection to new submissions. (If a volunteer later requests to maintain a closed collection, we’ll try to contact you to ask if you’d like to transfer the collection to their care; we would only make this transfer if we received approval from you.)

While we often help mods import archives which are closing (or already offline), Open Doors should be involved anytime one is planning to import works on behalf of another creator. For example, if you would like to back up an active archive to AO3, use AO3 as an extension of your archive, create a memorial account for a friend, or any other situation, please contact Open Doors.

Every archive is unique, and we adjust our process to work with each archive. This is an overview of the general steps and the usual order we do them in.

1. Make an agreement with the moderator of the archive (also referred to as the archivist).
2. Generate a list of creators and their works, so we can keep track of creator preferences if they tell us they’ve updated their email or don’t want their works imported. Depending on the format and size of the archive, this may be generated by technical volunteers. Otherwise, it will need to be created manually, either by the archivist or with the help of our import assistants.
3. Generate a list of tags used on the archive, and ask the AO3 Tag Wrangling Committee to map the original archive tags to AO3 canonical tags. You as the archivist can choose to keep the original tags instead, and creators can always update the tags on their works when they claim them.
4. We announce the import on AO3 and OTW social media, ask the archivist to announce it on the site and any social media, and send emails to the creators of the original archive if we have their email address.
5. Search AO3 for works in the archive. We know some creators have already posted their works on AO3 or may have cross-posted to another archive Open Doors has already imported.
6. Import the works! Depending on the format and size of the archive, we may have our technical volunteers help. Otherwise, each work will be posted manually either by the moderator or with the help of our import assistants.
   • We do our best to remove email addresses and other sensitive information from the import, but we don’t read every work.
7. If the archivist will be managing the collection, Open Doors leaves the collection to the archivist and sends any future creator queries to the archivist. If Open Doors will be managing the collection, we continue to own the collection and archivist account.

Every zine is unique, and we adjust our process to work with each publisher. This is an overview of the general steps and the usual order we do them in.

1. Make an agreement with the publisher of the zine.
2. Scan the physical zines as PDFs. Sometimes our partners at Zinedom already have scans. Otherwise, we coordinate with the publisher for one of us to make scans and upload them to our internal system.
3. Add all the works (fic, art, meta, anything that can go on AO3) to our internal database so we can keep track of creator preferences.
4. We announce the import on AO3 and OTW social media, and if the publisher has any places they can announce it they can announce it there too. We also send emails to the creators in the zine if we have their email address.
5. Search AO3 for works in the archive. We know some creators have already posted their works on AO3 or may have published to another zine or archive Open Doors has already imported.
6. Separate each work from the zine, then use OCR (optical character recognition) software on each written work. We then check that the OCR was performed correctly so the text is how it appeared in the original zine. We also keep track of which tags the work should be tagged with.
7. Import the works! This can either be done by the publisher or with the help of our import assistants.
8. If the publisher will be managing the collection, Open Doors leaves the collection to the archivist and sends any future creator queries to the publisher. If Open Doors will be managing the collection, we continue to own the collection and archivist account.

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.

Yes, absolutely. See “How will I get control over my imported works?”. If you prefer, we will also gladly work with you to find some solution other than deletion that preserves your work as part of the AO3 collection in a way that makes you comfortable. We also offer the option of anonymizing your work so it stays in the care of the archivist account, which would allow the work to remain available but remove any identifying information you want removed.

Because the archivist or publisher who controls the archive/zine you used decided to move to AO3. While all of AO3’s tools are designed to give as much control to the individual fan as possible, we believe that the archivist has responsibility and authority for the body of work as a collection. Archivists and publishers have moved archives onto different servers, updated the software that organizes the works, switched webhosting, reprinted zine issues, etc. to keep a collection of fan works alive, online, and together. Transferring or backing up a collection onto 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 they want and can set its rules, etc. Nonetheless, if an individual fan wants to remove their works from the original archive or from AO3, we provide easy tools for doing so; see below.

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.

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.

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 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.

• 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The Fan Culture Preservation Project (FCPP) is the cooperative program that the Organization for Transformative Works, through Open Doors, has with the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa and other partner institutions to archive and preserve fanzines and other non-digital forms of fan culture. It is dedicated to preserving fan artifacts such as letterzines, fanzines, and other non-digital fanworks and memorabilia at partner libraries and other institutions.

Each partner institution has its own policies on digitizing fanzines and other fannish material. Check an institution’s website or email them to find out more details. For information about each of our partner institutions, visit our Partner Directory.

Additionally, Open Doors collaborates with Zinedom on the Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP), which is dedicated to the digital preservation of select physical fanzine works and other fannish artifacts, with permission from the creators and/or publishers. For more information about the project, visit the FSHP website.

Respecting fans’ rights and privacy is the first priority for both the University of Iowa and the OTW. However, each partner institution includes different information in their fanzine catalogs, which may include creators’ legal names. Prospective donors will need to discuss specific privacy concerns with an institution as part of the donation process.

Each partner institution has its own policies on lending materials through interlibrary loan programs, though some places may be willing to share scans of fanzines if requested. Check an institution’s website or email them to find out more details. For information about each of our partner institutions, visit our Partner Directory.

Yes. Open Doors is in the process of developing a formal Fannish Estate Plan for fans wishing to donate their collections after they pass, but in the meantime, we can help you with appropriate wording for a bequest. Please contact the Open Doors committee for assistance or further questions.

For questions about preserving your AO3 account in the event of your death or permanent incapacitation, please visit the Fannish Next-of-Kin FAQ on the AO3.

While Open Doors doesn’t collect physical zines ourselves, we maintain a directory of partner institutions who are actively collecting fannish materials. We encourage you to review the list and identify which institutions are the best fit for your materials.

When contacting an institution, please include “OTW FCPP Zine Donation” in the subject line. In the body of your message, include as many details about the collection as you can—for example, the fandoms included, the type of materials, the number of boxes or volumes, and even a complete list of titles if you have one. The more information you can include, the easier it will be for an institution to evaluate the collection.

Given constraints on space and time, an institution may not be able to accept your collection even if it seems like it would be in scope. Try not to be discouraged if you need to reach out to multiple institutions before you find one that can accept your collection.

Some institutions may be able to help pay for shipping qualified donations to their location and may be able to schedule pickups. Prospective donors will need to discuss specific shipping arrangements with an institution as part of the donation process.

If neither you nor the library who is receiving your collection can cover shipping, Open Doors may be able to help! Please contact Open Doors so we can discuss possibilities.

No: both the FCPP and its partner institutions are interested in collecting materials from fans around the world, including materials that are not in English or do not come from English-speaking countries. However, as with U.S. donations, the ability to help with shipping will be dependent on available resources.

AO3 Memorial Archives are collections of fanworks imported by Open Doors for creators who have passed away. These archives are primarily created by AO3 in collaboration with the deceased creator’s next of kin or designated fannish next of kin. These collections are meant to preserve the legacy of creators after their passing, ensuring their works remain available – please contact the Open Doors committee if you want to honor a deceased creator by creating a dedicated archive collection on AO3.

You can posthumously create a collection for a creator through AO3’s memorial archives. In order to do this, you must be the creator’s next of kin or their designated fannish next of kin. Requests for memorial collections can be sent directly through our contact form. After we receive this form, we can begin the process. This process entails both you and a member of Open Doors signing a Memorandum of Understanding which details the terms of the import, announcing the memorial collection, and creating an archivist account for you from which you will upload the works.

At Open Doors, requests for memorial archives can only be made by a creator’s next of kin or their designated fannish next of kin. However, if you would like to see a creator’s fanworks imported, you can contact us through our contact form and include information about the creator’s next of kin or designated fannish next of kin if you have it.

Archive of Our Own allows users to designate someone to manage your fanworks in the event that you die or become incapacitated. Open Doors can only honor requests for memorial archives by a deceased creator’s next of kin or fannish next of kin. For more information on fannish next of kin and how to designate someone as your fannish next of kin, please check out the Archive’s FAQ.

No. If someone has named you their fannish next of kin and AO3 Support has already granted you access to their AO3 account, you may import their works originally saved or published elsewhere to AO3 via their AO3 account without needing to notify Open Doors. For more information, refer to the Archive FAQ.