TheOrganization for Transformative Works (OTW) is anonprofit,fan activist organization. Its mission is to serve fans by preserving and encouragingtransformative fan activity, known as "fanwork", and by making fanwork widely accessible.[2]
OTW advocates for the transformative, legal, and legitimate nature offan labor activities, includingfan fiction,fan videos,fan art,anime music videos, podfic (audio recordings of fan fiction[3]), andreal person fiction.[4][5] Its vision is to nurture fans and fan culture, and to protect fans' transformative work from legal snafus and commercial exploitation.[2][6]
OTW has 1,010 volunteers, net assets of $2.5 million and at least 15,810 paying members according to its annual report in 2021.[7]
The Organization for Transformative Works offers the following services and platforms tofans in a myriad offandoms:
Archive of Our Own (AO3): An open-source, non-commercial, non-profit, multi-fandom web archive built by fans for hostingfan fiction and for embedding other fanwork, including fan art, fan videos, and podfic.
Fanlore: Awiki for fans from a wide range of communities whose published mission is to provide a platform "to record and share their histories, experiences and traditions"[8] in fandom and fanwork history.
Open Doors: Preservation of fannish historical artifacts, such aszines andGeocities websites, as well as transferring fanfiction toArchive of Our Own from other websites when theyshut down.
Transformative Works and Cultures: Apeer-reviewed academic journal for scholarship on fanworks and practices
Legal advocacy to the fandom community, addressing thelegal issues with fan fiction and other fan works, including defending fans'fair use of copyrighted material.[9]
Fanhackers: A directory of information and resources to help fans, academics, and activists, including goodmetadata (information, analysis, and discussion about data).[11]
The OTW provideslegal assistance to the fandom community, addressing thelegal issues with fan fiction and other fan works.Rebecca Tushnet, a noted legal scholar on fanfiction andfair use in copyright and trademark law, works with the OTW's legal project. In 2008, the OTW (in coordination with theElectronic Frontier Foundation) successfully submitted requests to theLibrary of Congress for further exceptions to theDigital Millennium Copyright Act to allow the fair use of video clips for certain noncommercial uses such as video remixes, commentary, and education, as well as to protect technology used for such purposes. The exceptions were also successfully renewed in 2012 and expanded in 2015.[12][13][14] The OTW, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and New Media Rights submitted a new petition for exemptions in 2018.[15]
The OTW has also submitted severalamicus briefs to the courts in several cases involving intellectual property law:
InFox v. Dish, the OTW (in coalition with the Electronic Frontier Foundation andPublic Knowledge) submitted anamicus brief which argued in defense of digital recording methods used byDish Network, claiming that "The popular fanwork genre of noncommercial videos ('vids') uses clips from television shows or film, reworking them in a way that comments on or critiques the original. The Copyright Office has held that substantial numbers of vids constitute fair uses. But the creation of fan vids requires intermediate digital copying and processing in order to produce the transformative final product. OTW thus believes that intermediate copying performed to facilitate fair use constitutes fair use."[16]
The OTW has also instituted several projects for preserving fan history and culture. One such project was the creation of Fanlore, awiki for preserving fandom history. The Fanlore wiki was first revealed in beta in 2008, with a full release in December 2010.[18] In June 2018, there were approximately 45,000 articles and 800,000 edits to the wiki,[19] and it passed a million edits in January 2021.[20]
The OTW also has several "Open Doors" projects dedicated to the preservation of fannish historical artifacts. These projects include The Fan Culture Preservation Project, a joint venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at theUniversity of Iowa[21] to archive and preservefanzines and other non-digital forms of fan culture, and The GeoCities Rescue Project, which attempted to preserve content originally hosted on Yahoo's GeoCities by transferring that content to new locations on the Archive of Our Own or within the Fanlore wiki.[22] Other miscellaneous artifacts and collections are stored on the OTW's main servers in theSpecial Collections gallery.
Created by the OTW, the Archive of Our Own (often shortened to AO3) is an open-source, non-commercial, non-profit archive forfan fiction and other transformativefanwork. The Archive is built and run entirely by volunteers, many without previous coding experience.[23] The Archive was publicly launched into open beta on 14 November 2009,[24] and has been growing steadily since.[25]
Time magazine included Archive of Our Own on its list of "50 Best Websites 2013".Time said that AO3 "serves all fandoms equally, fromThe A-Team toZachary Quinto and beyond", and also called it "the most carefully curated, sanely organized, easily browsable and searchable nonprofit collection of fan fiction on the Web...".[26]
Fans post, tag and categorize their own works on AO3.[27] Volunteer "tag wranglers" link similar tags so readers can search for works in the categories and types they want.[28] The tagging system allows easy compilation of statistics (stats).
Fan fiction ranges in length, from fewer than one thousand words (flash fiction, or one-hundred-worddrabbles) to novel-length works, up to millions of words in length. According to an article on fandom statistics published onThe Daily Dot newspaper in 2013, AO3 hosts more very short works than long ones, but readers prefer the longer works. The average very short story received fewer than 150 hits, while novel-length works are more likely to receive around 1,500 hits.[29]
A writer who posts a story on AO3 can record its word count on the story's header, along with other information such as the story's fandom,ships, and other tropes. Some fan works are 'crossovers' that draw on two or more universes or characters. Writers can also note if their story is finished or a work in progress (WIP).[30]
As of 2018, the archive hosts more than 4.2 million works in more than 30,000 fandoms.[31] Destination Toast, fan and statistician,[32] compiles and analyzes fandom statistics, especially stats from Archive of Our Own, which she says is "the most easily searchable archive I know of."[33] In January 2016, she posted"2015: A (Statistical) Year in Fandom." It includes statistics from two other large fan fiction archives,FanFiction.Net (FFN) andWattpad as well as the popular microblog platformTumblr. The post shows that the most active fandoms on AO3 in 2015 were (largest first)Supernatural,Dragon Age,Harry Potter,The Avengers,Teen Wolf, andSherlock.[34] Other media sources include movies, television shows, and books includingThe Lord of the Rings,Doctor Who, andThe Hunger Games.
Transformative Works and Cultures is apeer-reviewed,open accessacademic journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works. The journal collects essays, articles, book reviews, and shorter pieces that concernfandom, fanworks, and fan practices.[35][36] According toHumanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC), the journal "supports the [Organization for Transformative Works's] mission to promote the legitimacy and sustainability of non-commercial fan creativity by providing a forum for innovative criticism infan studies, broadly conceived."[37]
The journal has raised the academic profile of female fan communities and transformative works, includingfan fiction,fan art,fan vids, andcosplay, by serving as a central publication venue for these topics.[41] Coppa states that many second-wave fan fiction scholars, such as herself, started to publish inTransformative Works and Cultures and that the journal has "nurtured a new wave of scholars".[42] Via a number of articles, the journal has had a hand in helping to spread Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green's idea of "spreadable media".[43]
^Hellekson, Karen; Blackford, Russell; Murphy, Graham (July 2008). "New Journal: Transformative Works and Cultures".Science Fiction Studies.35 (2):360–362.doi:10.1525/sfs.35.2.0360.JSTOR25475168.
_graphic_banner%2c_umbrella_of_OTW%2527s_projects.png)
)