Frequently Asked Questions - 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.

Please see the Open Doors project page for a complete explanation.

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. Your zines will be preserved for future generations to admire and enjoy.
• Infrastructure. The OTW is set up to bring in volunteers as well as 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.

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

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.

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.

While exactly how this will work is still under development, we currently are thinking the process would create a new community for these transferred stories within the archive, owned by the maintainer, and all stories added will be tagged with the name of the original archive. So for instance, if the Due South Archive at Hexwood archive were transferred in, all the stories might be tagged automatically with "hexwood" and a Hexwood community would be created within the Archive of Our Own. The moderator of the original archive would be invited to moderate the community within the Archive of Our Own.

In cases where the original archive site and address are still available, we also hope to set up automatic redirecting from the original URLs to the new locations in the Archive of Our Own, ensuring that existing links will be preserved. We also welcome maintainers who wish to back up the contents of their archives in the Archive of Our Own.

Archives that have been integrated into the Archive of Our Own will also be listed in the Open Doors gallery.

Contact Open Doors for access to the archive importer. Please let us know from the outset if you have special needs — for example, if you'd like us to take over maintenance of the old domain, or if your archive contains multimedia content.

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. We offer the option of "orphaning" the work, which would allow the work to remain available but remove any identifying information you want removed.

In early 2009, Open Doors launched the Fan Culture Preservation Project in conjunction with the Special Collections Department at the University of Iowa Libraries. This project is dedicated to preserving fan artifacts such as letterzines, fanzines, and other non-digital fan works and memorabilia. Contact the Open Doors committee for more information about donating zines or other artifacts of fan culture to the Fan Culture Preservation Project.