Archive of Our Own ^beta

September 5 is the OTW's birthday and this year, we are turning 18 years old! To celebrate this event, let's look back at some of the milestones the OTW's projects - AO3, TWC, Open Doors, Fanlore, and Legal Advocacy - have achieved over the years:

• As the first OTW Project, Legal Advocacy was launched in 2007, the same year as the organization itself.
• In February of 2008, TWC released its first call for papers! Shortly after, in June, Fanlore was launched.
• In late 2009, AO3 first went live. Roughly one year later, AO3 reached 10,000 users, with growth of the community accelerating ever since.
• In 2011, Open Doors was launched, and began importing archives in 2012.
• In 2015, the first ever International Fanworks Day was observed.

Since then, our projects have only continued to flourish and grow. AO3 has more than 9 million users and 15,730,000 works. Fanlore has nearly 80,000 pages and has seen over 1,657,000 edits. TWC is on its 45th issue. Open Doors has imported more than 100 archives, containing over 164,000 fanworks. Legal Advocacy fights hard for the rights of fans each and every day, responding to dozens of questions every year, filing Amicus Curiae briefs, joining coalitions, and more. All this and more is thanks to the support of fans worldwide; it wouldn't be possible without you!

If you're interested in how you can help, there are many ways for you to support us and our fannish community, and you can learn about some of them today by participating in our 18th Anniversary Bingo! On the card below you can see sixteen ways to contribute to the OTW or one of its projects. Some of these you might already have done, or are doing. You can cross those off!

Once you have a Bingo, we'd love for you to tell us what you did to get it! Tag us on social media using #18YearsOTW or comment below, and let us know. We're excited to hear from you!

If you're looking for other ways you can support the OTW, check out How You Can Help for more ideas!

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Start the party, the AO3 is turning 15 today! This year has been full of exciting new milestones. Our total number of users has passed 7.5 million, with the number of works on the archive surpassing 13.8 million! (with over 1.6 million of them written in languages other than English)

To celebrate AO3’s birthday, we prepared two fandom-related activities: a trivia game and a prompt challenge. You can find further details below!

Trivia Game!
How much do you know about AO3, beyond where to find your favorite works? About its history, infrastructure, or functionalities? Find out by participating in our AO3 trivia game. Who knows – you might win a cool prize!

For the next 15 days starting today, we will post a new trivia question every day (in this post and on our socials), along with a link to a Google form where you can submit your answer. We will check your submissions at the end of the 15 days, and randomly draw names from the highest scorers; they will receive AO3 merch as a prize!

• Day 1 - How many members does AO3 have (on the day of posting)? Submit your answer here!
• Day 2 - How old is the OTW, the parent organization behind AO3? Submit your answer here!
• Day 3 - What is the title of the fanwork, which currently has the most kudos on AO3? Submit your answer here!
• Day 4 - What is the most expensive donation reward for OTW donations? Submit your answer here!
• Day 5 - In what year was AO3 founded and who first proposed the idea for it? Submit your answer here!
• Day 6 - Which fanwork was bookmarked most by people last year (2023)? Submit your answer here!
• Day 7 - What are our two definitions of the word kudos? Submit your answer here!
• Day 8 - When did AO3 reach 10 million works posted on the site? Submit your answer here!
• Day 9 - The OTW (Organization for Transformative Works) is the volunteer-run parent organization behind AO3. How many volunteers does it have? Submit your answer here!
• Day 10 - What does the term "conceptual drift" mean in the context of metatags? Submit your answer here!
• Day 11 - What are three goals of the OTW Fanhackers Project? Submit your answer here!
• Day 12 - When did AO3 pass 10 million members on the site? Submit your answer here!
• Day 13 - AO3 is one of OTW’s many projects, along with Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), a peer-reviewed journal on fanworks and practices. When does TWC publish its annual general issue? Submit your answer here!
• Day 14 - What was the first major donation brokered by the OTW Open Doors project? Submit your answer here!
• Day 15 - What is the maximum number of tags an author can add to their work? Submit your answer here!

Prompts!
As a fun challenge for fanwork creators, the AO3 Prompt game will run for 15 days alongside the trivia game. Each day, a new prompt will be posted on our socials and to the collection! Don’t worry about missing one: you can choose prompts as inspiration strikes, using as few or as many as you like. When you’re done writing, you can add your work(s) to our AO3 anniversary collection!

So make sure to keep an eye on our social media channels, where we will post every day!

Thank you for celebrating 15 years of AO3 with us!

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Shoot the confetti, the OTW is turning 17 today! Since 2007 we have achieved a lot, and we're happy to celebrate another anniversary with you. Another year has passed, full of exciting achievements and milestones, including but not limited to:

• The Archive of Our Own reached 7 million users and 13 million works, with more than 300,000 non-English works added since last September alone,
• Open Doors imported 9 fanfiction archives into Archive of Our Own,
• The number of articles on Fanlore hit 70,000,
• And 14 articles, 5 symposia, 3 book reviews, and 2 multimedia works were published on Transformative Works and Cultures!

Since it's our birthday, we dressed up to celebrate. There is now an official OTW anniversary skin available on Archive of Our Own to mark the occasion, for a limited time only!

If you feel like dressing up your AO3 interface, you can use the anniversary skin by scrolling to the bottom of the page and selecting "Happy 17th!" under the Customize section. Alternatively, you can go to Skins in your Dashboard where you'll find the skin under Public Site Skins.

Want to rock your own style for the occasion? Did you know that you can create your own site skin in minutes using the Skin Wizard?

To do this, go to your Dashboard and select Skins.

Next, select Create Site Skin. Under Create Site Skin, you have the option to write custom CSS or use the Skin Wizard. For all you programmers out there, the first option could be a fun challenge! But the Skin Wizard offers a quicker and easier way to create your skin.

Once you select Use Wizard, a number of customization options will be displayed. First, give your site skin a unique title. If you'd like, you can add a description as well.

Next, you can choose your font and adjust settings like font size, work margin width, and paragraph gaps. (If you're unsure what any of these terms mean, check out the little question marks beside each option.)

After that, you get to pick your colors! You can change the background, text, header, and accent colors by entering the names or hex codes of whatever color speaks to you!

While creating your site skin, you also have the option to add parent skins. This allows you to combine and layer multiple site skins while creating your own. If you'd like to keep the default options for a specific parameter, simply leave that field empty.

Once you're all set, select Submit to make the magic happen!

Once you submit, you have the options to preview, edit, delete, or start using the skin. When you select Use, your skin will be applied to all pages on the Archive.

You can always edit or delete a site skin and start again if you want to do something different. The skins you create will only be visible to you.

However, in honor of the OTW's birthday, we would love to see some of your custom skins! Take a screenshot of your AO3 page with your custom skin equipped, and share it with us on one of our social media channels!

Thank you for celebrating the OTW's 17th anniversary with us! We wouldn't have made it this far without the dedicated fans and hardworking volunteers. We can't wait to see what the next year will bring, and what we will achieve together!

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

The Organization for Transformative Works turns 16 today! We are very happy to be able to celebrate another year with you all.

The OTW was born to serve fans and protect fan history and culture in all its forms; it’s our mission in troubling times. Since its foundation, OTW has helped rescue hundreds of fanworks from at-risk archives and platforms, old and new, making them accessible to millions of users; it has advocated for fans in an ever-changing legal environment; it has preserved fan culture through a wiki that you can contribute to; it has published 39 issues of an international, peer-reviewed fan-studies journal; and of course, it provides access to over 11 million fanworks.

But we want to hear from you! In order to better understand how to reach fans where they are, we'd like to find out what online spaces you are using to interact and exchange news. So, we've prepared a survey!

The survey asks between 16 to 35 ticky box and multiple choice questions (depending on what answers are given) and does not ask for any identifying information. All users will be anonymous. We ask that only those 18 or over take the survey.

TAKE THE SURVEY

In honor of our anniversary, the survey will be open for 16 days (closing on September 21 at 23:59 UTC). We will be sharing the results of the survey in a public report in October.

We're asking for your help – not only in taking the survey, but in helping us to spread the news that it is available! Please share the link to this post and use the #OTW16thSurvey tag in your fandom spaces!

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the festivities for the OTW’s 15th anniversary! We’re so inspired by your creativity and enthusiasm. We’d also like to recognize that the Archive of Our Own reached five million registered users on September 15th, which is a wonderful milestone to occur during a month celebrating the fan-made achievement that is the OTW.

Today, we’re pleased to announce the 15 winners of our anniversary trivia and fanworks challenge prize drawing. The following fans are the trivia winners:

Alex C
coprime
Emmerlie
FestiveFerret
ihni
Lumeleo
Moodle01
satbiym
Serpi
theirprofoundbond

We also randomly selected the following five fanworks on AO3 as winners of the fanworks prize drawing:

ThisFiniteLife - The Warden of the Sierra Madre
Boss_duck - Another 15 Minute Sketch
DaybreakOverRain - Birthdays
Helen_scram - For All Time
TheTimeTraveler24 - Dear Bianca

Later today, we’ll email all of our winners, who will have 72 hours to provide us with a mailing address to send their prize to. If you are a winner and do not see our email in your inbox or your spam folder within the next 24 hours, please contact the Communications Committee to let us know.

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the OTW15 | OTW 15th Anniversary Fanwork Challenge tag on AO3, Francesca Coppa’s Five Things an OTW Volunteer Said post, Constance Penley’s Guest Post, and our newly updated OTW History infographics.

It’s also not too late to join the Stub September challenge on Fanlore, which is ongoing until September 25!

The answers to all 15 trivia questions are listed below.

• Who were the guests at the OTW’s “The Future of Fanworks” live chat with fan studies scholars held in March 2014? Dr. Paul Booth, Dr. Anne Jamison, Dr. Frenchy Lunning, or Dr. Lori Morimoto
• What was the title of Michael James Heron’s journal article listed in the May 29, 2017, edition of Fanhackers’s fan studies research post? “Pacman’s Canon in C#: A Quantum Interpretation of Video Game Canon”
• How many fanworks (rounded to the nearest thousand) and how many archives did the Open Doors project import to AO3 in 2018? 12,000 fanworks, 11 archives
• On what date in 2018 did AO3 announce that it now supports emojis and extended character sets for several languages? December 14
• The games OTW holds to celebrate International Fanworks Day have generally included writing filk. Which two songs were shared with AO3 news readers in 2016? “Hey Jude” and “Thriller”
• The OTW's journal Transformative Works and Cultures announced it was replacing two sections in 2022. What were they? “Theory” and “Praxis”
• What are the names of the two digital projects included in Open Doors’ Special Collections Gallery? The Foresmutters Project and Missed the Saturday Dance
• What was the title of the letter that Legal Advocacy submitted to the U.S. Congress in March 2015? Supporting a Pro-Innovation, Pro-Creator, Pro-Consumer Copyright Agenda
• In what year did Fanlore run its first ever Stub September challenge? 2012
• What was the name of the Hugo Award category that AO3 won in 2019? Best Related Work
• In 2021, the OTW reported that one of its social media outlets grew its following from 21,000 followers to 271,000 in 2020. Which one was it? Weibo
• What is the name of the group of Fanlore volunteers who monitor the wiki’s recent changes to ensure that content is coherent, appropriate, and properly organized? Gardeners
• What was the title of the Transformative Works and Cultures issue released in March 2019? Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color
• What did the OTW say happened in August 2008 in their annual report? The vidding documentary produced in collaboration with Henry Jenkins and MIT’s New Media Literacy project was unveiled at Vividcon.
• Which fanfiction exchange was used by AO3 to test out its new Collections and Challenges code at the end of 2009? Yuletide

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Today, the Organization for Transformative Works turns 15!

Since its foundation in 2007, the Organization for Transformative Works has strived to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan culture, and it’s been an honor to do so through all of our projects for these last 15 years. Some of our major milestones over the last four years are shown below. For a look at more from our earlier days, visit the freshly-updated infographics on our website.

We’re incredibly grateful to all of the fans, volunteers, and OTW members who have brought our projects to life and made this work possible. We look forward to continuing our mission in the years to come, and we hope you’ll follow us as we do so! You can track updates to our projects through our news posts, project websites, and social media channels.

In the meantime, we’d like to invite you to join us this month in celebrating our 15th anniversary! Here’s how you can get involved and have the chance to win some OTW swag:

Trivia Game

Answer questions about our organization’s history for a chance to win OTW goodies! Here’s how it works:

1. Starting today, we’ll post a new trivia question about the OTW on Twitter each day for the next 15 days. To find the answers, you’ll need to explore the OTW’s project and news pages. We hope you’ll learn a little more about the OTW and how it works along the way!
2. By 15:00 UTC on September 21 (what time is that for me?), please submit all 15 of your answers to our Communications Committee. (Put “OTW Trivia” in the subject line of your message.)
3. Let us know in that message what name or pseudonym you’d prefer we use when we announce the winners.

Please do NOT post your answers publicly.

We’ll randomly select 10 winners from the list of people who correctly answer all 15 questions. If we do not receive enough correct responses to qualify for the prizes, we will include entries with 14 correct answers, or 13 correct answers, etc. until we have 10 winners.

Winners will be notified by email and have 72 hours to provide us with a mailing address for us to send their prize to. We will ship internationally, so everyone can participate. But if we do not hear back from you within that 3 day time frame, we will be randomly choosing another winner in your place. (Please check your spam folders!)

Check our Twitter account later today for the first question. Happy hunting!

Fanworks Challenge

If you’re a creator, you have another chance to win by joining us in creating 15-themed fanworks for the next 15 days! This can include any of the following:

• 15-sentence fics
• 15-minute fanart
• 15-minute (or less) podfics
• 15-item fanmixes
• 15-second fanvids

Tag your fanworks OTW15 | OTW 15th Anniversary Fanwork Challenge on AO3 or #OTW15 on social media, and we just might feature one of them on our social media accounts! We will be reblogging, retweeting, and reccing a selection of 15th anniversary fanworks for the next 15 days. We’ll also randomly select 5 fanworks posted to AO3 using the tag OTW15 | OTW 15th Anniversary Fanwork Challenge to receive prizes! If you do not want to be considered for a prize, please say so in the author’s notes of your work on AO3.

Fanlore Stub September Challenge

Fanlore’s annual Stub September challenge runs September 12-25, and in honor of the OTW’s 15th anniversary, this year’s theme is birthday/anniversary celebrations! Anyone is welcome to create a Fanlore account and help create or edit “stubs” – empty or short Fanlore articles – to win merit badges that you can show on your Fanlore user page or anywhere else. If you have any questions about how to get started as an editor or want to chat with fellow editors during the challenge, check out the official Fanlore Discord server.

News Posts

Get ready for some special interviews in our Five Things and Guest Post series! This month, we’ll be interviewing OTW cofounder Francesca Coppa, as well as Professor of Film & Media Studies and slash fandom acafan Constance Penley. In these news posts, you’ll learn more about studies of women in fandom and the early days of the OTW.

Your participation in the OTW has shaped it at every stage of its 15-year journey, and we hope that you feel the same pride and excitement that we do in reaching this milestone. Please take the time to get involved with our celebrations and – to all of our participants – good luck!

Break out the party hats, the Organization for Transformative Works is 14 today! We are delighted to celebrate another anniversary with you all.

The OTW's mission since we launched has been to protect fan history and culture in all its forms. All of our projects work towards this goal. Over the past 14 years, OTW volunteers have rescued hundreds of fanworks from threatened platforms and archives; acted as a voice for fans regarding copyright legislation around the world; published 35 journal issues' worth of peer-reviewed fan studies scholarship; built and supported a fan culture wiki that our users have edited over 1 million times; and developed an archive that now contains over 8 million fanworks.

As always, we would be unable to do any of this without the support of our members, users, and the massive number of volunteers who keep the OTW running and we would therefore like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We intend to continue our important work for many years to come. If you'd like to follow us as we do, you can keep track of changes to the AO3 via our news posts and can find updates on our other projects on our project websites and social media channels. And if you would like to get even more closely involved you can keep track of our volunteer openings on our webpage, too!

We hope that our projects will continue to be a beacon of enjoyment even in the present interesting times. If you have found yourself soothed or entertained by fanworks lately, why not pay the good feelings forward and leave a kudos or comment for a fanworks creator today? However you choose to celebrate, we would love for you to join us in marking this milestone amongst your social circles and fandom communities.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

The OTW is finally a teenager! Or to put it another way, we’re old enough to have an AO3 account of our own. We’re glad to celebrate this birthday with all of you.

Thirteen years ago today, the OTW was launched with the mission to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. Since then, we have advocated for fans in legal and government settings; have imported numerous archives at risk of being lost to platform stagnation and deletion; have developed a fan-generated wiki in which fans have contributed over 50,000 articles; have published 33 issues of our fan studies journal; and we now provide access to nearly 6.5 million fanworks.

Of course, there is always more work to do. The OTW exists for and because of our members and we look forward to hearing from (and working with) more of you as we continue to preserve and advocate for fanworks and their creators. You can keep track of changes to the AO3 via our news posts and can find updates on our other projects on our project websites and social media channels.

With that in mind, we would like to take this anniversary as an opportunity to thank the fans and volunteers whose creativity and support have kept the OTW alive, even through the unprecedented times in which we have found ourselves in this, our thirteenth year. We have an anniversary graphic to commemorate our birthday and we hope that you’ll join us in celebrating the milestone amongst your own social circles and fandom communities.