The week of January 13-18 is being used by a number of legal advocacy organizations in the United States as a week of action to speak out about potential changes to copyright law. The dates were chosen so that the week's conclusion on Saturday the 18th coincides with the anniversary of the SOPA/PIPA blackout in which many organizations and companies, large and small, worked together to protest this misguided legislative proposal.

On each day this week, organizations will focus on a different aspect of copyright. Today we are focusing on Open Access. Different entities define Open Access differently, but among its core principles is that the results of publicly funded research should be made publicly available, for free, online and in usable form. Open Access doesn't necessarily mean that everything in the world should have to be available for free--and the OTW supports the ability of fans to decide who should see their work and how their work can be used. But the OTW also believes that platforms should exist on which scholarly material is available and easily usable and quotable at no cost.

The OTW has walked the walk of this philosophy for five years with its publication Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC). Its editors and volunteers offer their services for free, as do all the OTW's staff, and they are committed to ensuring that the journal's content can be accessed by all. As TWC editor Karen Hellekson has written, the academics who have tried to move away from paywalled sites for academic research and print publications have found many barriers in their way.

"When I fill out forms, surveys, and index submission forms related to TWC and its practices, it becomes clear how strongly the print model affects every aspect of what is considered the norm for publishing. I skip entire sections: I don’t know the number of subscriptions because we don’t use a subscription model. I can’t estimate readership because many of the user accounts are obviously spam accounts, and plenty of readers never create a user ID. We don’t offer different levels of access to different people. We don’t have office expenses because we don’t have an office, instead using freeware OJS to shepherd copy through the publication process. I can’t estimate readership for an essay because our copyright permits the author, or anyone else, to repost, which bleeds off readers and thus they aren’t counted by the software. We have no income from reprint or author fees because we don’t charge those fees. All the questions meant to assess readership and subscriptions are, with an open access model, nearly impossible to estimate. Ironically, the traditional journal-publishing world seeks to maximize impact by minimizing access, even though study after study has shown that people are far more likely to read and cite publications available in full online."

This week marks a year since the death of Aaron Swartz, an activist committed to the principles of Open Access. At the time, the OTW's Fanhackers editor, Nele Noppe, wrote a post about why fans should be concerned about this issue, and how the about-to-launch Fanhackers project represented the OTW's commitment to this issue on behalf of fans and academics.

"[W]e'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."

For more about this week of action, visit the Copyright Week site, where links are being collected to various posts, whitepapers etc., and users and organizations are encouraged to endorse the principles. Participating organizations include Public Knowledge, Creative Commons, library associations, Ownership Rights Initiative, iFixit, and Wikimedia among others.

• While it's generally known that fandom is a major part of life on Tumblr, several researchers from Canada's Simon Fraser University will be presenting the results of their fandom study at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing conference in February 2014. Their paper is already available. "We investigated Tumblr fandom users’ motivations behind participating in fandoms, and how they interacted within the Tumblr community. Our results show that fandom users feel their Tumblr experience is ‘always-on’ where they participate at nearly any point in the day. They have also adopted a unique set of jargon and use of animated GIFs to match their desired fandom activities."
• RocketNews24 discussed how Vocaloid fandom has become a milepost for distinguishing otaku generations. "The real rise in Vocaloid’s popularity began in 2007 with the introduction of Hatsune Miku, though the software existed years before. Songs like Melt and The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku led to the character, Miku, becoming the axis of Vocaloid fandom, and people first falling into the series for more than just its capabilities as music-making software adopted the perspective that Hatsune Miku and Vocaloid are synonymous. According to Febri’s article, these people belong to the first generation of Vocaloid fans."
• On Grantland, Molly Lambert uses the Brony fandom revealed in its documentary to discuss adopted personas. "Defining yourself by the media you consume has always been commonplace, but it took social media to really demonstrate how inadequate it feels to reduce your personality into a series of lists. The ownership we feel over our favorite things is false, and Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook really served to drive this home. You like The Big Lebowski? Cool, so does everyone. The things you thought made you unique when you were the only person you knew interested in some genre of music, independent film, or corner of history turn out to be laughably banal. Even personality traits are memes, picked up and transmitted or willed into place."

What stories of fandoms developing do you have to share? Write about them on Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• The University of Minnesota's Minnesota Daily ran an article claiming that fanfiction has revolutionized literature. "Fan fiction is a perfectly competitive industry into which anyone, regardless of age, sex, or economic status, can enter and in which anyone can prosper...Ours, then, will be the first generation in history to have a durable literature written by the common individual. Until extremely recently, authors were predominantly rich, educated males with leisure time to write and enough money to be published...Fan fiction, for better or worse, will one day be studied alongside Homer and Dickens...Historians will be able to look back on our time and see the interests of everyone, not just a select minority."
• The Sydney Morning Herald followed up on the idea that fanfiction may reveal wider interests than mainstream commercial work previously allowed, stating 'The alpha male's seductive power may be waning'. "[A] new generation of romance writers and publishers are beginning to embrace metrosexual and bisexual heroes to reflect changing sexual tastes...Melbourne-based author Anna Cowan has caused a stir with a Regency romance that twists the gender role of her hero, a character partly inspired by gay fan fiction. Penguin's ebook, Untamed, features a dark, deeply damaged, cross-dressing duke who is bisexual. The Duke of Darlington sleeps with the heroine's sister, and with men, and is attended by a bunch of overtly gay dandies."
• A researcher who asked for help from OTW News readers in 2012 has since completed her work, which reveals some of these same issues of diversity in taste. Dianna Fielding wrote Normalizing the Deviance: The Creation, Politics, and Consumption of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identities in Online Fan Communities. "Communities of fan producers have been creating and consuming works labeled deviant by both laypeople and academics for decades. Fan producers take the popular media they enjoy and rewrite it to fit their needs and desires. Online, these fan producers have found a new space to re-write what it means to be normative. These fan producers often write about slash, which depicts homosexual relationships as normal, and genderswap, which plays with the idea of gender by physically switching characters’ sex...Through content analysis, a series of interviews (n = 26), and a survey (n = 224), of fan producers directly, this study gains a better understand of these producers’ motivations for producing fan works."

How have you seen fanfiction democratizing writing? Write about it on Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

Welcome to our Events Calendar roundup for the month of November! The Events Calendar can be found on the OTW website and is open to submissions by anyone with news of an event. These can be viewed by event type, such as Academic Events, Fan Gatherings, Legal Events, OTW Events, or Technology Events taking place around the world.

• There will be a fan event for The Hobbit on November 4 in 13 movie theaters around the world. There will be a live Q & A and exclusive footage shown in participating theaters. This will also be live streamed

  More about The Hobbit on Fanlore

• Supanova is Comic-con, Australian style! From November 8-10 in Brisbane and 15-17 in Adelaide fans and creative talent that inspire their imaginary worlds meet under one big roof.

  More about Supanova on Fanlore

• Join tens of thousands of fans from November 22-24 as they converge at Austin Comic Con 2013 Wizard World Convention in Austin, TX to celebrate the best in pop culture.
• 50 years ago the first episode of Doctor Who premiered on The BBC. The sci-fi series will be celebrating its anniversary on November 23. A special 90 minute episode, The Day of The Doctor, will be airing on tv and shown in 3D cinema's around the world. Find a theater near you to celebrate with fellow Whovians!

  More about Doctor Who on Fanlore

• DarkoverCon is a small and personal science fiction and fantasy convention held every year over Thanksgiving weekend for the last 36 years. Besides several full tracks of science fiction/fantasy programming and a full track of Steampunk programming.

  More about Darkover on Fanlore

• The Fan Studies network will be having its very first symposium at the University of East Anglia, on Saturday 30th November 2013. The Fan Studies Network 2013 Symposium will feature over 30 speakers on several topics related to fandom.

The OTW encourages anyone to submit an event that's not already listed, and to check out the events calendar throughout the year!