The Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting site for transformative fanworks such as fanfiction, fanart, fan videos and podfic. The Archive is a wholly fan-created and fan-run space, where fannish creativity can benefit from the OTW's advocacy in articulating the case for its legality and social value.

The Archive entered open beta in November 2009 and reached 1 million uploaded fanworks in February 2014. By July 2014, there were over 350,000 registered users, with fanworks in over 15,000 fandoms.

The Archive was entirely built and designed by volunteers from fandom. Many of our volunteers acquired skills in coding, design and documentation through their work on the project. The Archive's open-source software is currently hosted at GitHub. The Archive's servers are funded entirely by donations to the OTW. Users do not pay and there are no advertisements on the site.

Some of the Archive's notable features include:

• one-click downloads of fanworks in multiple formats (ePub, HTML, Mobi, PDF)
• freeform tagging system which allows fanwork creators to define their own tags for classification
• commenting, kudos and bookmarking systems
• options for users to view fanworks chapter-by-chapter or in their entirety, and to link fanworks in a series
• hosting of fanwork collections and challenges
• importing of fanworks previously posted elsewhere

More details on the project can be found in the FAQ, the Archive's roadmap and AO3 News posts. News from the AO3 is also available through Twitter and Tumblr.

Building the kind of archive the OTW envisions is not a simple process. We're not just setting up an archive using existing software, but building new open-source archive software designed around fans' needs, that can be easily maintained and easily reused, and that can handle potentially millions of stories from hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users.

This work is being done by a group of volunteers, including a group of trainees learning how to write and maintain code, to help build the fannish community of coders. This is a group of people who can help to maintain the archive software in future. In other words, we're not just building the Archive, we're building the builders.

We have also taken the time to develop comprehensive and fan-friendly policies with as much input from fans as possible; you can see our resulting Terms of Service on the Archive of Our Own.

This is taking a little while to do, but we absolutely believe it's worth the time. You can follow the progress of the Archive's development in our newsletters and our blog. To get involved, contact the Volunteers committee.

Our first goal is to create a new, free, open-source software package to allow fans to host their own robust, full-featured archives, which can support even an archive containing hundreds of thousands of stories and which has the social networking features to enable fans to connect to one another through their work.

Our second goal is to use this software to provide a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting place for fanfic and other transformative fanworks, where these can be sheltered by the advocacy of the OTW and take advantage of the OTW's work in articulating the case for the legality and social value of these works. Unlike other archives, the Archive of Our Own isn't run by individuals whose interest in fandom may wax and wane, but by a nonprofit organization run by an elected rotating board of committed fans. We hope that this will lead to more permanence and stability than some other archives or services.