The following was written by Journal Committee staffer Nele Noppe

Many readers of this blog will have heard of Aaron Swartz, a hacker and free culture activist whose suicide on January 13 sent shockwaves around the Internet. One of the many things Swartz campaigned for - in fact, the cause that got him in the most trouble in the end - was open access to academic research, a cause near and dear to the OTW in general and its Gold Open Access academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) in particular.

I want to take this sad opportunity to say a few words on what open access is and why it's so important for research on fans. Academics who research fans must do their utmost to make sure their work is available for everyone, particularly fans, the very group they're studying; and all fans should have the right to access to research on topics that are relevant to fandom.

What is Open Access?

Open access is the idea that academic research should be available for free to anyone who wants to read it. An open access academic journal makes its articles available online, entirely free for anyone to read. TWC is a good example of an open access journal. Open access publishing, although gaining traction, remains a departure from the traditional and still-dominant model of spreading the results of academic research, which is to publish papers in (expensive) print journals and locked online databases. That publishing system is becoming controversial among many academics, in part because it monetizes the content not to authors or scholarly organizations, but to the large publishers that negotiate and then retain control of access. Locking research away in expensive databases denies access to the many nonacademics who genuinely need information from academic research. Even information created through taxpayer-funded research, such as information funded by the US National Institutes of Health, is locked away, even though such articles are meant to be open access and cannot be copyrighted.

Let's take a hypothetical example of a fan worried about copyright, and the academic paper that could ease her concerns. (This example supposes that said fan doesn't ask for free advice from the OTW's friendly legal experts.)

Fan A has just been told that the GIF set she's posted is illegal. She's confused and wondering whether she should take her work down. Unbeknownst to her, publicly funded law researcher B has written a solid and well-thought-out journal article about copyright and GIF sets that says exactly what fan A needs to hear. How likely is it that the information from researcher B's research will make it to the person who needs it, fan A?

• First of all, and perhaps most importantly, fan A is unlikely to find out that the article even exists in the first place. The closed online databases that contain academic articles don't tend to show up much in search results from regular search engines. The specialized search engines and search techniques used to find content in academic works can be very handy if you know what you're looking for and where to look, but they're not very relevant to how many nonacademics try to find information.
• If fan A does find out about the article's existence and guesses from the title and abstract that it may be useful, she probably won't be able to gain access to the online academic database that houses it. Unless fan A happens to attend a university whose library had enough money to pay tens of thousands of dollars in subscription fees to get access to that database, fan A's only option is to buy a download copy of the article. The cost for a single academic article of around thirty pages is often in the $20 to $45 range, and there may be no way to get a preview of the article to find out if it actually contains the information needed. Unless fan A is swimming in money and can afford to buy a couple of $20 articles in the hope of stumbling across what she wants, she won't pay this.

And that's where fan A's attempts to get anything useful out of academic research will probably end. Thousands of academic researchers do massive amounts of work on topics that are relevant to fans, but if that research is published in a closed journal, only other university-affiliated researchers, or people who physically go to a library that happens to subscribe to the relevant databases, can ever see it. Fans who may need the information are locked out.

Calls to action in memory of Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was campaigning to change all this. He believed that information should be free. In January 2011, he used MIT's academic network to gain access to a huge academic database, JSTOR, and then used a script to download copies of eight million academic articles. It was an activist stunt, not an attempt to rob JSTOR of income, and JSTOR declined to press charges after Swartz gave them the copies he made. However, prosecutors still decided to charge him with thirteen separate felony counts related to the way he gained access to JSTOR's database. These felony counts could have ended up costing Swartz a fine of up to $1 million and decades in jail. His trial was due to begin in only a few months, but 2 years to the day after he was arrested for the JSTOR case, he killed himself. Many commentators claim that the threat of draconian punishment may have contributed to Swartz's decision to take his own life, and that the charges were mostly baseless regardless. No one was hurt; no money was lost.

The tragedy of Swartz's death has activists calling for reform of the Copyright Fraud and Abuse Act under which Swartz was charged, and the criminal justice system that threatened him with disproportionate punishment. One of the first and most conspicuous of these calls was made by academics on Twitter, who used the hashtag #pdftribute to post public copies of their papers that were first published in locked journals.

While actions like #pdftribute are admirable, they're not a sustainable solution to the access problem - and not just because we can't rely on every individual researcher to do this. Let's get back to fan A and her copyright worries for a second. What if researcher B becomes concerned about giving the public access to her research, and tweets a copy of her paper? Would that mean fan A can find what she needs?

Nope. The fact that a free PDF of an article is floating around somewhere doesn't mean that the information inside it becomes magically available to fan A. To point out just one obstacle: how is she even going to locate that file? Even if she managed to find out that researcher B's article exists, all fan A will find by searching is the paid version, with no indication that there's a free PDF around that she might find with a little more digging. Further, it's likely that researcher B doesn't have the legal right to distribute her paper, even though she wrote it: she signed over copyright to the journal it appeared in.

Long term solutions

To make a long story short, making research accessible isn't just about removing obscene price tags from academic articles. While the term "open access," used in its specific, legal sense, refers to journals that publish free copies of papers, making research truly accessible requires so much more than that. Open access is also about making sure that important research results are made available in a place where the people who need the information are likely to find it. (Imagine how much faster fan A could have found the info she needed if someone had mentioned researcher B's conclusions in, say, a relevant Wikipedia article!) Open access is also about making sure that people without experience decoding academic papers can still read and understand the information. Open access is also about making sure that the information is published in a format that people can reuse, and under a license that allows them to reuse it.

Improving access by fans to the academic research being done about them has been a key concern of the OTW from the very start. Since its founding in 2008, TWC has published no less than 200 articles, interviews, editorials, and book reviews (bibliography). Making sure that all this research is available for free online has taken tremendous effort; to get some idea, read this post by journal editor Karen Hellekson about the difficulties of running an online academic journal in an academic publishing system that doesn't value online content.

Fanhackers, Coming Soon

But just "free" is not accessible enough, and limiting our efforts to what happens within our own organization is no longer enough. That's why in a few weeks, we're launching a new project to expand our efforts toward making research truly useful and relevant beyond the borders and acafannish audience of TWC. We'll experiment with concrete ways to make research on fans more accessible and usable, encourage researchers to publish their work in an open way (no easy task when the closed print model carries prestige, which in turn can be used toward promotion and tenure), and give any support we can to other projects that share those goals.

In 2008, Aaron Swartz articulated the feelings of many when he wrote in his "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" that keeping academic research behind pay walls is "a private theft of public culture" that should be resisted by all means necessary, especially by the researchers who can actually access all those locked papers. We call on all academics whose research is relevant for fans to make sure that their results can actually reach the people who need information.

The system of tagging that AO3 uses is categorized as a 'curated folksonomy', a term which here means 'a free-for-all tagging system supervised to some degree by a band of merry curators'. Though there are a few other 'curated folksonomies' out there, the one used by AO3 is unique in many ways, making the tag-wrangling system an innovation in archival organization and cataloging. (Want to read more on curated folksonomies? Check out (Curated Folksonomies and Tag Folksonomy and Tag Synonyms).

At AO3 the Tag Wrangling Committee organizes the curation which is carried out by approximately 160 tag wranglers. The following is a conversation with part of the committee -- Co-Chairs Emilie Karr & Alison Watson, and staffers Jenn Calaelen, Franzeska Dickson, and Sam Johnsson. For the sake of brevity and readability, the replies have been compiled as a group response, and wording has been altered to make answers more understandable to a general audience.

Q: What were some of the first things you learned in order to get up to speed as a Tag Wrangling staffer?

A common challenge is learning to utilize the various tools that are available to OTW staffers and volunteers. This includes a site known as Basecamp, and the chat system, Campfire. Newer staffers are still finding out how things work there and the various things it can do. Because volunteers coming into the OTW have varying skill levels, not all of them have much experience with social media or wiki browsing and editing. Tag Wranglers use an internal wiki system for documenting rules about tagging, as well as recording committee minutes and other material pertinent to their work. This means that learning the tag wrangling guidelines that already exist is a separate learning curve from using the sites and tools themselves, and different members of the committee tend to become more familiar with some parts of tagging guidelines than others.

Q: What have been the big challenges for the committee this term?

One aspect has to do with helping tag wranglers manage their experience as volunteers. The staff need to make sure people are able to keep up with the workload they've taken on. It's easy for a wrangler to assign themselves too many fandoms, and then because of surges in AO3 activity or technical issues, vacations or other personal reasons, it may turn out they haven't wrangled a fandom in a few months. If one of their fandoms is big or active, that becomes a problem because it's difficult to catch up when they are able to wrangle again. And the staff also needs to be concerned with wrangler morale, trying to keep both wranglers and staff from getting too discouraged by internal and external criticism of their work.

Another aspect has to do with taking on work most tag wranglers either can't do or feel intimidated about doing. This includes matters such as cross-fandom content, or things that don't belong in any specific fandom. That's not explicitly a committee-level thing, but wranglers are usually more comfortable sticking to things that have clear guidelines and that don't have a risk of trespassing on someone else's fandom. Sorting out these types of tags is always an ongoing process and the committee is looking forward to better wrangling tools that will improve mass wrangling (many fandoms at once).

The last issue relates to problems on the Archive that also affect readers and posters. If users are seeing 502 error messages, that means that wranglers have been seeing them for a week or more because the wrangling interface used by wranglers gets lower priority than the AO3's user interface. So if the Archive's suffering from technical issues, wrangling may come to a complete halt. But since users may be able to continue posting their work even when wranglers are at a standstill, then new tags that are being created are going unwrangled for longer periods of time. As mentioned before, this is a particular problem with high priority fandoms, those getting a lot of additional works and readers. The AO3 filters being down has meant that wrangled tags are even more important to finding things, while also meaning that a lot of wrangling work is less useful because users aren't able to use tags to their full extent. An increase in 502s usually coincides with lots of new traffic, meaning more new users who don't yet know how to find things on the Archive, and new works with new tags that need to be wrangled. Lastly everything in the list of feature requests that Tag Wrangling has made to the Accesibility, Development & Technology Committtee (which runs the archive) gets pushed farther down the priority list because dealing with a technical crisis is always of the first importance.

Q: Do all of you work on the same projects or do you work on different tasks?

We have a rotation for meeting minutes, other tasks we tend to self-assign. We've brainstormed lists of things that need to get taken care of. We check in (on Basecamp) before meetings to talk about what work we've been doing. Most projects tend to have one or two people focusing on them, but everyone else provides advice and support. In a given week there are various routine tasks such as working on the internal wrangling newsletter; hanging out in chat in case any wranglers come by with questions; training new wranglers when we have an influx; checking on the status of various fandoms to see what may be falling behind; putting things onto our wiki pages, after we've made decisions, or we've clarified the guidelines already there; discussing support requests; and preparing posts for the wrangler mailing list (usually discussions involving new/changed guidelines, in order to get feedback from wranglers).

Q: How would you describe the Tag Wrangling Committee's role in creating and maintaining guidelines for tag wrangling?

We're the maintainers and the advisory committee. Some changes come because of user requests we receive through the Support form on the AO3. User mandate tends to be the rule unless it's a contested issue among groups of users. A lot of guideline questions are raised by wranglers and we listen to the full list's feedback. But the staff is needed to coordinate the majority rule, and then it makes the decision in cases where there is no strong opinion emerging. The Tag Wrangling staff are then responsible for writing the wording to try and reflect the decision correctly and then announce all new guideline decisions to the wranglers, to make sure everyone's informed. Not everyone sees or remembers the messages so we poke wranglers who aren't following them. This is generally done by leaving comments on the tags themselves, which is something we can see behind the scenes but is currently invisible to the public.

Q: What has been involved in preparing these tag wrangling guidelines for public viewing?

Immense gratitude for Sam Johnsson who is coordinating this work. We have been using the guidelines going public as an excuse to give them a full overview. There's been three kind of "translations" involved in this preparation. The first is purely technical, translating wiki code (which was used for its posting to the internal wiki) to HTML (for posting it on a public website). The second is some rewriting for greater clarity. A document that faces internally to people who use it regularly reads differently than a document intended for people who are sitting outside, learning about these issues for the first time, and who aren't clear about the steps that wranglers would then take once reading them.

But the biggest problem has been catching jargon. This is not just because people tend to develop terminology that works as shorthand, but also because over time various different terms have come into use for the same thing on the AO3. For example the tags that users can filter on are commonly called canonicals by tag wranglers but are also labeled 'common', a possible holdover from the term coders put into text back when the AO3 was still in alpha stage and it simply never got changed. Similarly, "freeforms", another common tag wrangler term, was changed to "additional tags" in the forms that users see because initially -- in closed beta -- on the new works page they were just called 'tags', and a lot of users were inclined to put anything in there, from fandom to character tags. The term "additional" never fully transitioned to behind-the-scenes use, possibly because that doesn't work as well as a noun! But the term "additional tags" makes more sense to users than "freeforms" since the meaning isn't as clear as "character" or "relationship" tags. The tag wranglers are still struggling with the best way to express the the filterable/canonical/common dilemma since "canonical" is easily confused with a series canon meaning.

You'll be hearing more from the Tag Wrangling Committee on various tag-related issues in the coming months as our filters return and the guideline publishing is completed. In the meantime, if you have questions about tags or the committee, you can always send a question to our Support team, who'll pass it on to the Wranglers. The Tag Wrangling Committee also has a Twitter account at ao3_wranglers for all sorts of tag-related discussion.

One of the important considerations in any election is that the people running it should not allow their personal views to affect how the candidates are treated, and should not abuse their authority. To help make this clear and prevent any confusion, we've laid out a few guidelines for the various staff involved behind the scenes.

Besides facilitating everything for the candidates and liaising with the current board, the Elections Officer has a very public role as they are the interface between voters and the OTW. The Elections Officer is allowed to post their thoughts on the direction of the org up until the deadline for candidates to declare they are standing, but cannot do so during election season. The Elections Officer must not endorse particular candidates in private or in public, and the Elections Officer will not comment on the strategic direction of the org or other hot topics once election season starts, excepting any statements required as part of their other org roles. Once a week during the election season, the Elections Officer will discuss with the board which are the hot topics and areas where the Elections Officer should remain clearly neutral. Election season is defined as beginning with the candidate declaration deadline, and ends after the possibility of an election recount has passed.

The same rules about not endorsing candidates either in public or private, and not commenting publicly on the direction of the OTW or hot topics, will apply to the two Webmasters staff involved in counting votes. These staff members will also not be named outside of the Webmasters committee, the Elections workgroup or the standing Board, so that they cannot be put under external pressure to falsify results.

Board members other than the Elections Officer are free of these restrictions, and may endorse candidates publicly and comment on issues affecting the org just as they would at any other time of year.

If you have any other concerns about the neutrality of staff involved in the election, or how things are run to give a level playing field to all candidates, do contact the Elections Officer or the current Board.

Spotlight on Board: In this general bi-monthly series, individual OTW Board members will talk about their work, goals, and ideas from a more personal perspective. Today's post is by Jenny Scott-Thompson.

I started out my year as Secretary by writing up the list of goals from the old and new boards. These are available in our Board minutes. Here they are in the order they were first mentioned in the meeting (as we went round the people present):

* Code of conduct
* Strategic planning
* Internal communications
* External communications
* Robust coding team
* OTW convention
* Marshall AO3 user base for OTW funding and recruiting
* Budgeting process
* Consider our fannish vs. non-profit identity
* Make use of non-profit best practice
* Work on importing (Open Doors)
* Develop the Dark Archive for vids
* Board culture/communication
* Board liaison role
* Consider identity as legal project, wiki project, OSS project
* Talk to EFF and Dreamwidth about best practices
* Website redesign

I'd like to talk through each of these.

Firstly, the Code of Conduct. This ties in to other projects that the Volunteers & Recruiting committee (VolCom) are working on, including the Conflict Mediation process, Constructive Corrective Action Procedure, and better induction and training. But the code of conduct is key, for making it clear what behaviour is and isn't acceptable, and what the consequences of breaking each rule are. This is essential both for staff who keep the rules, to know that they are safe, and for staff who break the rules by accident or on purpose, to know what will happen and how they can make amends. You can get away without it in a small community of friends, which the OTW was to start with, but it's needed in an organisation the size we are now. Personality conflicts are inevitable, and we need to be professional about handling them. VolCom have planned dates for this in their new project planning set-up, and have brought on an extra person to consult specifically on this project. So I'm both optimistic and impatient.

Secondly, Strategic planning. Our Strategic planning workgroup is now up and running. They are meeting weekly and gathering data from staff and volunteers. In parallel, the Survey Workgroup have gathered data from our users and members, and are already starting to share that with committees and the public. Synthesising all the data into a formal plan will take a while, but we're already getting a much better idea of what people think and want, and committees are starting to make changes in line with the data they're receiving.

Thirdly, internal communication. We've improved the format of our monthly "Org-wide" meetings, where all our volunteers can share news and requests for help on projects in progress, and discuss issues that affect the whole organisation. We've had some helpful discussions already this year, ranging from transparency to burnout. We've also opened up the open session parts of our weekly board meetings to a larger number of our staff. This gives us a balance between having enough room to work so that we're not in too much of a fish-bowl, and showing more people what the regular work of board is actually like. We're also posting our minutes publicly, and are gradually working on the backlog of older minutes.

Along with that goes external communications. This year's new Communications team has had lots of ideas and plans, and already some of the effects can be seen. It's taking a while for the culture to shift and the changes to bed in, of course, and the more we put out there, the more people want. You see enough to realise that there is even more that you're interested in knowing, but we're getting there.

Next is getting a robust coding team. This one is harder. Some internal board discussions have started around coding and AD&T, but the people we need to take part in those discussions are also busy fire-fighting the AO3 performance issues. It's a classic problem of balancing short-term and long-term needs. If we don't give some attention to the long-term, the short-term needs will never calm down. But equally, the short-term needs affect users right that minute, so they need to be given a certain priority. I'm hoping that we can continue with these discussions soon.

There was a request for an OTW convention. Personally, this is the one goal I don't agree with. What we have done, however, is expand our convention outreach in general, with panels on OTW projects, flyers for staff to hand out, and an OTW table at Ascendio. Development & Membership and Open Doors are working on increasing our links with fannish conventions, so that we can, for example, rescue left-over zines at the end of a con, that would otherwise be thrown in the bin.

We wanted to marshall the AO3 user base for OTW funding and recruiting. I think we can say we've made a huge stride forward here, with the entire AO3 user base emailed during the April drive. Many new people donated, and filled in our community survey. We'd like to do more, though, in particular making the OTW link and basic info about the organisation more prominent on the AO3 site.

We want to improve our budgeting process, making it slightly more formal, better documented, and increase our advance planning. A proposal is being drafted by Finance. This one's been on the cards for the past few months, but Finance is unexpectedly short of experienced staff this year, so our Treasurer has been working hard on everything at once, and it's taken a while for the less urgent things.

We wanted to consider our fannish identity and non-profit identity, and talk more about how we can balance when they conflict. We don't have anything to show for this yet, but it's factored in to several of our conversations within the board.

We want to make better use of non-profit best practice. This is a slightly frustrating one - there are many people in the org who have professional experience or are familiar with best practices, but we often don't manage to apply that very well. Sometimes that's a mental trick - I've occasionally caught myself not thinking to use tactics from work when facing a similar problem in the OTW. And sometimes it's because other people in the organisation aren't familiar with those ideas, and oppose them for various reasons. We're trying to improve our training and discuss this more, but in most cases there's no quick fix - this will take time.

A big target for this year is to work on importing, particularly through Open Doors. We started the year with the Smallville Slash Archive import to the AO3, which completed successfully. The next one on our list is 852 Prospect - the import is planned, but waiting for when the AO3 performance issues calm down.

Continuing the archiving theme, we're still hoping to develop the Dark Archive for vids. There's no update on this yet - it needs a few key people to drive it forward, and all the people with those skills have been busy with more urgent projects.

There was some discussion during the last election about Board culture, relationships and communication. At the beginning of the year, we discussed our preferred communication styles, and expectations for liaising and updating the rest of the board. We agreed upon three email subject line codes -- (FYI) (Vote) or (3Day) -- to make it clearer what we need from one another so as to enable people to handle emails quickly. Those who were on the board last year have said that things are much better than they were.

Another Board-specific goal was to formalise the liaison role. Julia discussed this topic in a previous Board post. Some board members have liaison agreements with their committee chairs, which are all on the internal wiki. There's more to do, but it's a good step in the right direction, without forcing too much formal documentation on committees who don't want it.

We planned to consider our identity as a legal project, wiki project, and OSS project. This is a similar kind of thing to the fannish vs. non-profit discussion, but we've had even less chance to talk about it. So no update yet, but it's still on our list and at the back of our minds during discussion.

We wanted to talk to EFF and Dreamwidth about best practices. This has been a frustrating one for me. I've had some personal talks with Denise from Dreamwidth, and we're finally starting to pick Mark's brains on the AO3 performance problems, but I'd like to expand our formal and informal links with other organisations much more, to work with people who share our values, and not duplicate efforts or reinvent the wheel.

The last project on the list was our transformativeworks.org website redesign. The Webmasters committee produced an excellent redesign roadmap, which was approved by board. They've now carried out the first step, of gathering input from all projects and committees about the target audience and aims of the site. They've made the decision to split out the code update (from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7) and the content and navigational changes (to be better organised for our users) from the visual changes (to update the CSS and make the design look more modern). They're now getting into the nitty-gritty stages of working on it, alongside their day-to-day duties.

Overall, we've made a lot of good progress, but there's still even more to do. I'm particularly pleased about my personal projects of the public board minutes, the IRC channel and the strategic planning process. I'm also proud of the Open Doors committee, one of the groups I liaise with, who have made huge strides forward this year with their internal processes and preparation for more imports. I'm particularly looking forward to the code of conduct, conflict mediation, and other projects to increase volunteer retention, and to more steps towards translation and fanart on the AO3, including Support requests in other languages, the goal of another committee I liaise with.