Since at-risk archives are often older archives where many users have moved on and/or changed their contact details, we can't guarantee that everyone affected will know ahead of time, but we'll do our best to make sure people are aware.
So you're outright acknowledging that people who have given permission for their fiction to be hosted on a SPECIFIC site and archive will have their work stolen and put on a completely unrelated archive without their permission.
It's a fact of fandom that email addresses and contact details are sometimes temporary. It's a fact of the earlier days of fandom on the internet that service providers went broke with surprising regularity, meaning owners lost control of email addresses without choosing to let them lapse.
Ethically, this is really murky. Fannishly, it shows a complete contempt for fannish rights. Fanworks should NEVER be added to an archive without the owner's permission - if the owner can't be contacted, then archiving their works shouldn't go ahead.
It's always been the fannish norm that fen have the right to control ownership of their own works. This goes against all fannish norms. Zine owners didn't just get old zines, photocopy stories and artwork, and republish as new zines without the creators' permission. Even if the fen had moved on and left the fandom - perhaps especially if so, because some fen have real reasons from disassociating themselves from a fannish past.
And also - it's simply wrong. Theft of fanworks, which is what this amounts to, is just completely and utterly ethically unsupportable, and no airy-fairy "But they're at risk!" justifies this. No one's desire to read something should trump the rights of its creator. And no one's personal fannish goals of preservation or anything else should be allowed to trample on the rights of creators, either.
Please reconsider and only archive works for which you have been able to contact the owners and gain explicit permission.
Thanks for your comments. As we say in the main post, we are only moving archives with the consent of the archivist. Archives have always changed maintainers, hosts, servers, and software, though it isn't always visible, and this is a visible version of that. The Open Doors SSA is not a new archive, but a move of the old one, where works were only archived with permission.
Right now, some archives like the SSA are broken--if a fan wants to remove her works, she might not be able to do so. This change enables her to claim her works and remove them, if that's what she wants.
Along with sending individual messages to the contact addresses on the original archive, we are asking the current custodians to publicize the shift as widely as possible. Even if fans no longer have access to the contact address on the SSA, they can always ask Support to claim, edit, orphan, or delete their works. We think this represents the best balance between preservation of an important fannish resource that is otherwise going to disappear, despite the desires of many authors, and control by individual fans.
I would thank you for your answer, except that it seems that you have not actually addressed any of my concerns.
Server changes are a fundamentally different thing than mass-importing stories without authorial consent to a separate, established archive. You are very clear in your own materials that this will not be a mirrored archive for preservation purposes, but importing to collections on a pre-existing archive, AO3. It's not an equivalent situation.
The republication without consent is the issue at hand. It's not enough to say "Oh, well, if they actually find out, even though they have no reason to go looking and are highly unlikely to know anything about it, because who really goes and looks up old inactive archives they used to use, we'll take them down then once the damage is already done" - consent has to be gained beforehand in order to have any ethical ground to stand on at all. How can someone delete something they don't know is there? That excuse makes no sense.
If consent can not be gained, then it is fundamentally wrong to take the stories. Archivists are responsible for maintaining their own sites, not for giving consent for other people's creative works to be copied to a completely different archive that they may not like or support. In fandom, creators have always retained control over their own works - that is the fannish norm, and fannish ethics.
I don't see any balance here at all, but the blatant disregard for fannish norms, fannish rights, and fannish ownership of their own created material. The only "balanced" approach would be to contact all fans when possible, put the announcements up on the archives ahead of time, giving a reasonable amount of time for fen to respond, and then only copy stories for which explicit permission was given. Not knowing about something =/= consent.
that is otherwise going to disappear, despite the desires of many authors
If the authors wish their works to be on AO3 or any other archive for preservation purposes, then presumably they would archive their works at other sites themselves. There is nothing stopping them, and in fact many authors choose to cross-archive their works. Other authors, however, have made clear decisions as to which archives they wish to use, and have chosen not to use general archives at all. It seems to be readers and the AO3 archive that this is for the benefit, and authorial rights to control our own material seem to have nothing to do with it.
It's extremely disappointing that you have decided on such an unethical approach, while caring to claim about fannish rights and fannish history. I wish that you had actually looked to fannish history, and seen the very different (and much more ethical) approach to bringing the Professionals circuit archive to the internet - nothing is on the Internet archive that was not put there with the explicit consent of the authors, no matter how difficult it was to achieve. That was the "balanced", ethical path.
Again, let me emphasize that Open Doors exists because archivists want to maintain their archives but lack the resources to do so. No work that wasn't digitized and available online beforehand will be digitized or made available online as a result of importing.
Our view is that the archivist has been given the power to make hosting decisions beneficial to the collection and that their choice to back up or archive the collection in the Archive of Our Own is a decision like these others.
It's also worth noting, as I said, that anyone who wanted her stories removed from the SSA because of Minotaur's passing can't have that done as matters stand, because while the current archivists have the database, time and change have made the database hard to deal with. Importing is a way to allow authors renewed control, and we are publicizing that to the best of our ability.
Comment on Open Doors Questions - And Answers
Lily (Guest) Tue 28 Feb 2012 12:05AM UTC
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