What Does Open Doors Mean?
Fandom CultureThe OTW project that rescues at-risk fanwork archives by importing them into AO3 with the works' authors credited and contactable. When an aging fandom archive is about to vanish, Open Doors is how its fic survives.
Open Doors in Practice
Decades of fandom output lived on hand-coded archives and hosting that depended on one volunteer's time and money, and when those gave out, entire fandoms' histories went dark. Open Doors works with archive owners to migrate collections into AO3, preserving the works, crediting the original authors, and letting authors claim, orphan, or remove their imported fic. The project has saved hundreds of archives, from major fandom institutions to tiny single-pairing sites, and import announcements are small celebrations in older fandoms. It is fandom preservation as deliberate practice — the institutional answer to decades of learning that everything not backed up eventually disappears.
Example usage
"My favorite 1999 fic survived only because Open Doors imported the old archive before the hosting lapsed."
Related Terms
OTW (Organization for Transformative Works)
The nonprofit founded by fans in 2007 that runs the Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, and Open Doors, and advocates legally for fanworks. The OTW exists so that fandom's infrastructure is owned by fandom itself.
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AO3 (Archive of Our Own)
The largest fanfiction archive on the internet, run by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works. It is fan-built, donation-funded, ad-free, and famous for its powerful tagging and filtering system.
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Fanlore
The wiki run by the Organization for Transformative Works that documents fandom history, terminology, communities, and events from a fan's-eye perspective. It is the closest thing fandom has to an institutional memory.
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Dead Fic
A work in progress that will never update again — abandoned in fact, whether or not the author ever said so. Pronounced dead by readers after enough years of silence.
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