Organization for Transformative Works

Its vision is to nurture fans and fan culture, and to protect fans' transformative work from legal snafus and commercial exploitation. OTW has 983 volunteers, net assets of approximately $3.8 million and at least 14,959 paying members according to its annual report in 2024.

• Type — Non-profit • Main Organ — Board of directors, elected annually • Name — Organization for Transformative Works • Abbreviation — OTW

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).

The OTW provides legal assistance to the fandom community, addressing the legal issues with fan fiction and other fan works. Rebecca Tushnet, a noted legal scholar on fanfiction and fair use in copyright and trademark law, works with the OTW's legal project. In 2008, the OTW (in coordination with the Electronic Frontier Foundation) successfully submitted requests to the Library of Congress for further exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow the fair use of video clips for certain noncommercial uses such as video remixes, commentary, and education, as well as to protect technology used for such purposes. The exceptions were also successfully renewed in 2012 and expanded in 2015. The OTW, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and New Media Rights submitted a new petition for exemptions in 2018. The OTW has also submitted several amicus briefs to the courts in several cases involving intellectual property law: • In Fox v. Dish, the OTW (in coalition with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge) submitted an amicus brief which argued in defense of digital recording methods used by Dish Network, claiming that "The popular fanwork genre of noncommercial videos ('vids') uses clips from television shows or film, reworking them in a way that comments on or critiques the original. The Copyright Office has held that substantial numbers of vids constitute fair uses. But the creation of fan vids requires intermediate digital copying and processing in order to produce the transformative final product. OTW thus believes that intermediate copying performed to facilitate fair use constitutes fair use." • In the case of Ryan Hart v. Electronic Arts, the OTW (in combination with the Digital Media Law Project and the International Documentary Association) submitted a brief arguing that Electronic Arts's use of factual information (such as the height, weight, and jersey number of football players) in creative works (in this case, video games) is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The OTW has also instituted several projects for preserving fan history and culture. One such project was the creation of Fanlore, a wiki for preserving fandom history. The Fanlore wiki was first revealed in beta in 2008, with a full release in December 2010. In June 2018, there were approximately 45,000 articles and 800,000 edits to the wiki, and it passed a million edits in January 2021. The OTW also has several "Open Doors" projects dedicated to the preservation of fannish historical artifacts. These projects include The Fan Culture Preservation Project, a joint venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa to archive and preserve fanzines and other non-digital forms of fan culture, and The GeoCities Rescue Project, which attempted to preserve content originally hosted on Yahoo's GeoCities by transferring that content to new locations on the Archive of Our Own or within the Fanlore wiki. Other miscellaneous artifacts and collections are stored on the OTW's main servers in the Special Collections gallery.

• Italic Title — no • Title — Transformative Works and Cultures • Abbreviation — Transform. Works Cult. • Editor — Kristina Busse, Karen Hellekson • Discipline — Interdisciplinary • Publisher — Organization for Transformative Works • License — * Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 (2008–2017) • Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (2017–present) • History — 2008–present • Openaccess — Yes • Impact Year — 2015 • Issn — 1941-2258 • Website — http: journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/index Transformative Works and Cultures is a peer-reviewed, open-access academic journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works. The journal collects essays, articles, book reviews, and shorter pieces that concern fandom, fanworks, and fan practices. According to Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC), the journal "supports the [Organization for Transformative Works's] mission to promote the legitimacy and sustainability of non-commercial fan creativity by providing a forum for innovative criticism in fan studies, broadly conceived." The founding editors were Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson. They stepped down from their editorial positions in favor of Mel Stanfill and Poe Johnson in 2022. It covers "popular media, fan communities, and transformative works". The journal has raised the academic profile of female fan communities and transformative works, including fan fiction, fan art, fan vids, and cosplay, by serving as a central publication venue for these topics. Coppa states that many second-wave fan fiction scholars, such as herself, started to publish in Transformative Works and Cultures and that the journal has "nurtured a new wave of scholars". Via a number of articles, the journal has had a hand in helping to spread Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green's idea of "spreadable media".

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