Open Doors offers shelter to at-risk fannish projects such as archives and fanzines. Each of their subprojects preserves different kinds of fanworks and artifacts of fan culture.
Their main areas of focus are:
- AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project: A collaboration between the OTW and Zinedom (a fan-run preservation project) to bring digitized copies of print-based fanzine works to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).
- Online Archives: Imports of at-risk fanwork archives and challenges to AO3 for preservation.
Their other projects include:
- Fan Culture Preservation Project (FCPP): A joint venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa, along with other collecting institutions, to archive and preserve fanzines and other non-digital forms of fan culture.
- GeoCities Rescue Project: A project to preserve fan sites that would otherwise have been lost through Yahoo’s closing of GeoCities in October 2009.
- Special Collections: Rescued digital projects that cannot be integrated into AO3 or Fanlore. It includes PDFs, multimedia fanworks, historically important fan sites, and other digital artifacts.
- Yahoo Groups Rescue Project: A project to preserve fanfiction, fanart, and meta from Yahoo Groups which would otherwise have been lost when the platform closed in January 2020.
Read more about Open Doors on their website.
Our Mission
Open Doors’s mission is to preserve fanworks for the future while respecting their curators and creators. Their goal is to archive and preserve all types of fanworks and artifacts of fan culture.
Open Doors will only preserve collected fanworks with the full consent of the curator of the collection. If the curator or the OTW Board later chooses to end the collaboration, Open Doors will delete the imported collection from AO3. Any works already claimed (whether attached to an AO3 account or anonymized) or orphaned by AO3 users will remain under the control of the respective accounts. Open Doors will work with the original curator to delete any unclaimed works.
Open Doors believes and supports that control over individual fanworks contained within an AO3 collection rests with their creators. If a verified creator requests the removal or alteration of their work, OTW will honor the request within a reasonable timeframe. Creators may also claim their works, attach them to an AO3 account, and edit, orphan, or delete them as they choose.
Open Doors aims to provide a permanent home for fannish projects while ensuring that original curators and creators retain control over their contributions.
Our Team
The OTW supports all of its projects, and many committees contribute to the Open Doors project in some capacity. However, if you’d like to help exclusively with Open Doors work, check out the Open Doors committee. The Open Doors committee works with archive moderators to import at-risk online archives to AO3, facilitates the donation of fanzines, and works with zine creators and publishers to import zine works to AO3.
Outside of the Open Doors committee itself, several other OTW committees help support this project:
- Communications publishes news posts about Open Doors, including announcements about digital imports to the AO3, large donations to the FCPP, and other outreach efforts.
- Legal provides us with legal advice and reviews updates to our policies and to Memorandums of Understanding (the contracts between the curators and Open Doors).
- Systems provides technical expertise on how imports may affect AO3’s server load, helps set up redirects from an original archive to its imported collection on AO3, and transfers ownership of the domains of at-risk archives from the current moderator to the OTW. Systems also helps Open Doors host banners (or other media files) of imported archives on OTW servers, and helps maintain the Open Doors website.
- Tag Wrangling connects AO3’s tags to those from imported archives to ensure imported works are filterable and findable.
- Translation translates the announcements Open Doors publishes with Communications, especially for non-English archive imports.
Get Involved
Opportunities to volunteer for Open Doors are posted on the OTW Volunteering page typically twice per year. For answers to common questions about volunteering and recruitment, take a look at our Volunteering FAQ.
Volunteer recruitment is announced on the OTW website and in AO3 news posts. It is also shared on all social media sites where we actively post. If you want to make sure you hear about the latest recruitment opportunities, check out our OTW News by Email service. This allows you to sign up to receive an email notification whenever we publish a news post (including recruitment calls).
If you have any other volunteering questions, reach out to our Volunteers & Recruiting committee. They handle recruitment and induction for all OTW committees.
Learn More
You can learn more about Open Doors in the Open Doors FAQ. If you have any other questions, contact the Open Doors committee.