Archive of Our Own
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Type of site
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Fanfiction |
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| Founded | September 2008 |
| Owner | Organization for Transformative Works |
| Website | archiveofourown |
| Commercial | No |
| Users | about 1,176,000 (2017) |
| Launched | November 15, 2009 (Open beta) |
Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a nonprofit open source repository for fanfiction (fic) contributed by users. The site was created in 2008 by the Organization for Transformative Works and went into open beta in 2009. As of 2017, Archive of Our Own hosted over three million works in over 24,600 fandoms. The site has received positive reception for its curation, its organization, and the feminist, value-sensitive design of the site, mostly done by readers and writers of fanfiction.
In 2007, a site called FanLib was created with the goal of monetizing fanfiction. Fanfiction was authored primarily by women and FanLib, which was run entirely by men, drew criticism, ultimately leading to the creation of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) which sought to record and archive fan cultures and works. OTW created Archive of Our Own (abbreviated AO3) in October 2008 and established it as an open beta on November 14, 2009. The site's name was derived from a blog post by the writer Naomi Novik who, responding to FanLib's lack of interest in fostering a community, called for the creation of "An Archive of One's Own".
By 2013, the site's annual expenses were about $70,000. Fic authors from the site held an auction via Tumblr that year to raise money for Archive of Our Own, bringing in $16,729 with commissions for original works from bidders.
Archive of Our Own runs on open source code programmed almost exclusively by volunteers in the Ruby on Rails web framework. The developers of the site allow users to submit requests for features on the site via a Trello board.
Stories on Archive of Our Own can be sorted into categories and tagged based on elements of the stories, including characters and ships involved and other more specific tags. Volunteers called "tag wranglers" manually connect synonymous tags to bolster the site's search system, allowing it to understand "mermaids", "mermen", and "merfolk" as constituents of the "merpeople" tag, for example. Archive of Our Own allows users to rate their stories by intended age ("General audience", "Teen and up audiences", "Mature", and "Explicit") and to supply content warnings for their works ("Major Character Death", "Graphic Depictions of Violence", "Underage", and "Rape/Non-Con"). Archive of Our Own allows writers to publish any content, so long as it is legal. This allowance was developed as a reaction to the policies of other popular fanfiction hosts such as LiveJournal, which at one time began deleting the accounts of fic writers who wrote what the site considered to be pornography, and FanFiction.Net, which disallows numerous types of stories including any that repurpose characters originally created by authors who disapprove of fanfiction. Readers can give stories kudos, which function similarly to likes on other sites. The site does not require real names from its users, who may identify themselves by one or more pseudonyms linked to their central account.
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