Organization for Transformative Works

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit, 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 videos, 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.

OTW has 1,010 volunteers, net assets of $2.5 million and at least 15,810 paying members according to its annual report in 2021.

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

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:

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.