1. Introduction
[1.1] For transformative fandom, a collaborative community "wherein people remix canonical media texts into original creative works" (Floegel 2022, 90), the loss and displacement that come with platform death are commonplace experiences that contribute to its technology-agnostic nature (Fiesler and Dym 2020). As so-called textual poachers (Jenkins 2012), online communities built around sharing and consuming transformative fan works are susceptible to both legal challenges by copyright holders opposed to fair use remixing of their proprietary media (note 1) and corporate censorship of fannish engagement with explicit or taboo subjects on commercial websites. But cross-platform movement is not always a compulsory endeavor.
[1.2] Although common wisdom dismisses platform policy as a topic of interest or import for the average user, Fiesler and Dym's investigation into online platform migration in fandom communities points to bad policy as a leading factor behind user attrition in sites such as LiveJournal (LJ, now defunct) and Fanfiction.net (FFN), at one time the predominant platforms for reading and writing fan works (2020). In contrast, their data points to good policy as a major reason for joining the Archive of Our Own (AO3), a fan-created, fan-run site whose archival purpose outweighs its marginal social functionalities. Yet AO3's governing documents, which include otherwise thorough policies on data privacy, copyright advocacy, and user-uploaded content, contain a glaring omission: Neither the archive nor its parent group, the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), possess a publicly available digital preservation policy.
2. AO3 and the promise of permanence
[2.1] While the group now manages several projects aimed at the defense and preservation of fannish culture, AO3 is arguably the OTW's raison d'être. In May 2007, LJ user astolat responded to the growing threat of exploitative commercialization by urging the creation of a fan-controlled archive that would, among other things, address the precarity of digital fan works by providing them with a dedicated, permanent home (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own). This initial call to action, in conjunction with ensuing community discussions and the recurrent purging of fannish content from websites like LJ, resulted in the establishment of the OTW as a volunteer-run organization that would bring the project to life using "open-source archiving software designed and built by and for fans" (https://archiveofourown.org/faq/about-the-archive). In addition to new uploads, AO3 also includes "functionality for directly importing content from other platforms," enabling its efforts to "rescue…at-risk fannish content" through the Open Doors initiative (Fiesler and Dym 2020; https://www.transformativeworks.org/our-projects/opendoors/). The goal of preservation is therefore woven into AO3's founding principles. In describing its activities, however, the OTW has seemingly conflated preservation with ongoing access—which, while an equally admirable purpose, does not account for whether or not the OTW possesses the technological, financial, and policy framework to support the long-term digital preservation of both the archive and its contents.
[2.2] Many assume that digital assets are more permanent or less prone to material deterioration than analog records, but the precarity of such assets is determined by an array of external factors—from storage and budget limitations to rapid technological changes and digital obsolescence—as well as by their inherent lack of fixity. To withstand "the limits of media failure or technological and organisational change" (Digital Preservation Coalition 2015), digital materials require planned and ongoing management. Digital preservation may therefore be understood as a systematic effort to store and maintain access to digital materials, be they digital in origin or the result of digitization activities, either indefinitely (long-term) or for a defined period of time (short- or medium-term). Significantly, digital preservation is not a uniform process with a predetermined outcome, but a set of activities determined by an organization's context, resources, and goals.
[2.3] It may be fair to say that, in the case of AO3 and the OTW's overall mission, there is no preservation without access—or, better yet, that "access is what [they] are preserving" (Talboom and Underdown 2019). If understood as a community archive as outlined in Abigail De Kosnik's Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, AO3's goal can be reframed into the preservation of the culture of an online community by serving as a centralized system where said culture, made tangible through its material output, "can be easily found, clearly identified, and quickly learned by every member of that community" (2016). Long-term access to the platform (at its various stages of growth and development) and even a much-diminished portion of the user-uploaded materials it currently houses would therefore sufficiently fulfill that goal. But without a robust policy to gather and contextualize their access-oriented practices as structured efforts for digital preservation, words like permanent and long-term seem far too abstract.
3. Why we need policy
[3.1] A digital preservation policy is, by definition, a publicly available document outlining the strategies which the repository will employ toward the ongoing preservation of the digital records in their custody. As Bountouri puts it, "defining the Preservation Policy is the most significant part of the digital preservation lifecycle. It is not only the important directives and guidelines that this document provides aiming to cope with technological and organizational issues; it also helps to build the 'preservation culture' inside an organization by defining its commitment toward a specific digital preservation policy" (2017, 40).
[3.2] The Digital Preservation Coalition (2023) echoes the significance of building an internal preservation culture by stating that "the purpose of a policy is to support consistent decision making about digital preservation over time (and across the organization)." It is not enough that the repository state its commitment to preservation. Rather, a policy should identify the strategies through which the repository's commitment will be put into action, and outline elements of scope, purpose, and philosophy (Bountouri 2017).
[3.3] Given that the OTW's elected leadership is, by design, continually in flux, policy would not only "clarify [the] scope and aims" of AO3's preservation activities, but also "act as a powerful internal advocacy tool" in the event that personal attitudes and biases lead to decision-making that contradicts the archive's mandate and ultimately impact its preservation efforts (Digital Preservation Coalition 2023). A clear-sighted, publicly available digital preservation policy would therefore increase the organization's trustworthiness to those outside of its administrative body (note 2), especially in light of recent controversies surrounding the OTW's management, including its lax stance on AI-generated content on AO3 and the group's failure to proactively moderate and respond to instances of racism (https://fanlore.org/wiki/2023_OTW_Management_Controversy; Floegel 2022).
[3.4] To be sure, the OTW is refreshingly transparent about the finances associated with all of its projects, releasing yearly budgets and reports that include detailed statements of financial position. Traces of the opportunities and challenges involved in AO3's ability to operate as a permanent repository can be found, if one knows what to look for. Running the Archive of Our Own accounts for 67.7 percent of the OTW's expenses in its 2025 budget, and the bulk of that is dedicated to server hosting, hardware and equipment, and to purchasing new servers to accommodate ever-growing site traffic and content (https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/31420). It is public knowledge that the platform's servers are owned by the OTW and funded entirely by donations (https://archiveofourown.org/faq/about-the-archive), which reveals that AO3 boasts an enviable degree of control over its digital presence in contrast to archives forced to rely on third-party servers, and that the platform's claims of permanence are contingent on the continued goodwill and monetary support of its user base.
[3.5] AO3's existence as an archive, digital repository, and read-write platform is also unique in that its collection is not stable. While traditional archives often require that legal ownership over records be transferred to the institution, ownership over fan works uploaded to AO3 remains in the hands of their creators, and, so long as one retains access to the account(s) their works are linked to, creators are free to remove or edit them, as well as to delete any reader comments left on said works. On the other hand, users may upload content anonymously, and account terminations can leave behind orphaned works, leading one to wonder if and how AO3 retains metadata about provenance—a core archival principle referring to a record's origin—for the purpose of preserving said works. Allusions to backup copies and records-retention standards are vague and scattered across the website, buried within Terms of Service and FAQ pages; they ought to be compiled in the form of a comprehensive digital preservation policy. Although AO3's prioritization of authorial control certainly adds a layer of complexity to the task of digital preservation, it is hardly an impediment. Initiatives devoted to the preservation of Indigenous knowledge and data, for example, have repositioned archival repositories as stewards, enabling individuals and communities to preserve cultural goods while incorporating principles of ownership, control, access, and possession (OCAP) that challenge traditional archival theory (https://fnigc.ca/ocap-training/). In formulating a policy, the OTW has the opportunity to affirm its position as stewards of digital fandom culture, and to outline how AO3's approach to digital preservation is consistent with the platform's retention or withholding of author data.
[3.6] Who in the organization is responsible for assessing and ensuring the site's long-term viability as an archive? Given the particularity of its multifaceted role as a digital platform and repository, how does AO3 measure the success of its preservation efforts? Writing about the inherent challenges of preserving born‐digital material, Cannelli and Musso acknowledge that "the sheer amount of digital artefacts produced … represents a significant problem in terms of selection, storage, description and organisation" (2022, 262). Well-intentioned as it may be, AO3's "goal of maximum inclusiveness of fanwork content" (https://archiveofourown.org/tos_faq) poses issues around sustainability, both environmental and in terms of infrastructure. How will the organization's approach, which favors accumulation over selection, impact server capacity in the long run, especially in light of its position on allowing AI-generated works to potentially flood the platform (https://archiveofourown.org/tos_faq; De Kosnik 2016)? Beyond user-initiated web crawling through the Internet Archive, are there consistent internal efforts to archive the website itself? And does the archive consider contextual metadata preservation—for example, in the form of descriptive metadata that would explain the fandom origins of a given fan work should the original media be lost or difficult to access—part of its mission? These are just some of the questions left unanswered in the absence of policy.
4. Digital preservation and fan fiction
[4.1] There is no question that transformative fandom predates the internet. Literary societies that facilitated gatherings for enthusiastic readers of authors such as Jane Austen and Arthur Conan Doyle formed as early as the 1920s, and fans of the 1960s science fiction program Star Trek popularized the dissemination of original fiction based on the show's plot and characters in fanzines like the pioneering Spockanalia, which ran for five issues and earned a public endorsement from series creator Gene Roddenberry (Ivan 2023; Reißmann et al. 2017). Still, like many creative endeavors that began offline but have flourished with widespread access to digital spaces, fan fiction "is now primarily an online practice and the fastest growing form of writing in the world" (Fathallah 2020, 858). It has, over the years, proliferated on various platforms that met unfortunate ends or adopted restrictive policies that alienated their fandom-oriented user base.
[4.2] Recognizing this pattern, the team behind AO3 established their goal for "a non-commercial space where creators are able to permanently preserve and freely share as many of their fanworks as possible" (https://archiveofourown.org/tos_faq). In a 2012 interview, OTW founding board member Francesca Coppa spoke of the dynamic between AO3 and Tumblr—a social platform founded around the same period as AO3 and similarly significant as a digital (albeit nonarchival) space for transformative fandom: "There was no Tumblr when we started designing this thing [AO3]. And I don't know that there will be a Tumblr in four years. But we'll [AO3] be around in four years, or ten years" (De Kosnik 2016, 94). Seeing as the archive is not only around in 2026 but continually growing, Coppa's confidence was well placed.
[4.3] As a fan-run platform, AO3 allows for creative and nontraditional approaches to both archiving and digital preservation. But policy is still a powerful tool, and one that the OTW makes extensive use of in defense of transformative fandom's legal right to create and share. At the time of AO3's founding, transformative fandom was somewhat marginalized as a subculture. It made sense that OTW's approach to preservation was focused on fighting loss and performing plenitude (De Kosnik 2016), resulting in the relative vagueness of its intentions for preservation. But, for better or worse, fandom has reached the mainstream, and AO3 must adapt its mission accordingly. Since 2017, at which point the platform reportedly included 1,994,607 works (Hill and Pecoskie 2017), the number has risen to an astounding 14,694,484—an increase of roughly 637 percent (note 3). In a recent paper about preserving the web, Hegarty writes, "Digital archival practices are at once a (socio)technical and imaginative effort. Through these practices, certain ideas become mobilised and embedded in institutions and processes that orient (often mundane) practices towards a desired future" (2025, 901). Policy is a way to make this desired future communicable and actionable—which, in the case of a publicly funded organization, is crucial to ensuring continued support.
5. Conclusion
[5.1] In writing this article, I address the OTW as a longtime user of AO3; an advocate for the importance of fannish digital preservation; and someone who believes that, to realize its long-term goal, AO3 must sharpen its vision through policy. Given the evolving position of transformative fandom in the mainstream cultural debate and the large-scale changes that new technologies like generative AI have wrought on creative online spaces, drafting a digital preservation policy would grant the OTW the opportunity to respond to the contemporary needs and wants of its designated community, and to plan for the future of AO3 as a vehicle for preservation in light of its current sociopolitical context, rather than remain fixed on the circumstances that bred its initial development.