Scholarly publishing is broken. Despite decades of critique and the promise of Open Access, we still have a system characterised by gatekeeping, inequity, and rigid formats that exclude innovation and marginalised voices. What if the solution doesn’t lie in tweaking existing models, but in learning from an entirely different community that has already solved many of these problems – and just happens to involve a lot of people writing stories about Yoda, James T. Kirk and Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a community-run digital repository hosting over 15 million works of fanfiction. Entirely open access, powered by volunteers, run on donations, and built on open-source principles, it demonstrates what’s possible when platforms are designed by and for their communities rather than for commercial profit.

This session will introduce AO3 and some of its innovative features: from its flexible ‘folksonomy’ tagging system that lets users create wonderfully descriptive and specific tags like “Han Solo Needs a Hug” while maintaining discoverability through smart metadata mapping, to its multiple peer review models, support for diverse content formats, and non-hierarchical recognition systems.

You don’t need to know anything about fanfiction to engage with this session. What you do need is curiosity and a willingness to consider what internet fandom can teach us: how to transform scholarly communication from a gatekept, hierarchical system into a collaborative, community-led ecosystem that actually serves scholars, libraries, and the public, rather than corporate shareholders.

Help us, fandom, you’re our only hope.