Organization for Transformative Works

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Organization for Transformative Works

Full Name:	Organization for Transformative Works
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Biography

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a non-profit, fan activist organization. Its mission is to serve fans by preserving and encouraging transformative fan activity, known as "fanwork", and by making fanwork widely accessible.

OTW advocates for the transformative, legal, and legitimate nature of fan labor activities, including fan fiction, fan vids, fan art, anime music videos, podfic (audio recordings of fan fiction), and real person fiction. Its vision is to nurture fans and fan culture, and to protect fans' transformative work from legal snafus and commercial exploitation.

The Organization for Transformative Works offers the following services and platforms to fans in a myriad of fandoms:

Archive of Our Own (AO3): An open-source, non-commercial, non-profit, multi-fandom web archive built by fans for hosting fan fiction and for embedding other fanwork, including fan art, fan videos, and podfic.
Fanlore: A wiki for fans from a wide range of communities whose published mission is to provide a platform "to record and share their histories, experiences and traditions" in fandom and fanwork history.
Open Doors: Preservation of fannish historical artifacts, such as zines and Geocities websites, as well as transferring fanfiction to Archive of Our Own from other websites when they shut down.
Transformative Works and Cultures: A peer-reviewed academic journal for scholarship on fanworks and practices
Legal advocacy to the fandom community, addressing the legal issues with fan fiction and other fan works, including defending fans' fair use of copyrighted material.
Vidding (2008): a series of six short documentaries on vidding, in combination with participatory-culture academic Henry Jenkins and the New Media Literacies project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Fanhackers: A directory of information and resources to help fans, academics, and activists, including good metadata (information, analysis, and discussion about data).