How Fanfiction Can Help Us Reimagine Scholarly Publishing

For decades, the scholarly publishing system has rightly been critiqued for perpetuating inequity, pricing out the public and the underfunded, and enshrining rigid formats that often exclude innovation and marginalized voices. While open access (OA) once promised to democratize scholarly communication, it has, in many cases, become as commercialized as traditional publishing: a pay-to-publish system hampered by the same gatekeeping, just under a different economic model.

And paywalls don’t just exclude readers through cost; they also limit awareness and discoverability, keeping research outputs invisible to much of the public. As Melissa H. Cantrell and Lauren Collister argued in their recent discussion of the “wicked problem” of scholarly publishing, incremental change is unlikely to resolve these systemic flaws.

Many innovative scholarly publishers have already experimented with parts of this system—from diamond OA journals built on volunteer labor, to platforms like PubPeer testing new modes of peer review, to metadata librarians refining discovery systems. But these efforts are scattered and piecemeal.

If we are serious about addressing these problems, we need to stop tinkering around the edges. What if the inspiration for a more inclusive, decentralized, and participatory publishing platform came not from within the academy, but from the world of fanfiction? Yes, fanfiction.

Fanfiction and Scholarship

At first glance, fanfiction—non-commercial works created by fans who reimagine and remix existing stories, characters, and worlds—and academic research may seem worlds apart. But look closer, and both are practices of deep engagement, intertextual interpretation, and knowledge creation.

Fanfiction doesn’t just regurgitate stories; it interrogates, reinvents, and expands on them, often filling in gaps and exclusions left offscreen. Likewise, scholarship builds on prior work, challenges assumptions, and contributes new insights. Both are iterative, dialogic, and community based. And both, at their best, come from a place of passion and curiosity.

What is AO3, and Why Should We Care?

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a community-run digital repository for fanfiction. Launched in 2008 by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), AO3 is entirely open access. It charges nothing to publish, nothing to read, and is powered by open-source code and volunteer labor. As of May 2025 (according to the OTW Communications Committee), it hosts over 15 million works across 71,880 fandoms and sees a daily average of 94 million hits.

What makes AO3 especially intriguing as a potential model for scholarly publishing is not just its scale or popularity, but its structure: community ownership (collective and user-driven governance), decentralized moderation (with volunteers overseeing submission and behavior), and a flexible, user-driven metadata tagging system that enhances discovery and interaction. It’s a digital infrastructure designed around user agency, flexibility, and creativity. In short, it embodies many of the values that scholarly communication claims to uphold but often struggles to realize.

AO3 is not unique in being open source and volunteer run. Wikipedia, for example, is a volunteer-driven knowledge commons familiar to many AO3 users. The difference is how AO3 brings these elements together in a cohesive platform deliberately designed to serve its community. Scholarly publishing, by contrast, too often feels designed to serve corporate profit margins. This is the pivot point: what would it mean to design our infrastructures around the communities that use them, rather than around extractive logics?

Three Features that Set AO3 Apart

Three key elements make the AO3 model radically different from traditional publishing platforms:

Open Source and Community Owned

AO3’s entire infrastructure is built using open-source software, meaning its design, structure and workings are transparent, customizable, and shaped by those who use it. Developers from within the community contribute updates and features, driven by user needs and priorities rather than commercial interests. This creates space for genuine community governance.

User-Generated Content and Peer Moderation

All works are submitted, moderated, and organized by users. Volunteers, often with deep subject expertise, handle everything from moderation to metadata wrangling. Importantly, this approach doesn’t lead to a collapse in quality or coherence. Instead, it cultivates a sense of ownership, accountability, and trust.

For scholarly publishing, this model may sound radical, but it’s less of a departure than it seems. Academics already contribute their unpaid time and labor to the publishing system as authors, peer reviewers, and editors, propping up the infrastructure of academic publishing while the profits flow elsewhere. A volunteer-driven model like AO3 would not ask more of scholars. But the experience of volunteering would be different: instead of donating labor to bolster corporate profits, scholars would be contributing to a shared, community-owned platform that aligns with academic values.

Flexible Tagging System

AO3’s folksonomy-based tagging system is arguably its most innovative feature, embracing the chaos of user-created language on the front end while mapping it to standardized metadata behind the scenes. This is done by ‘“tag wranglers”—volunteers who link users’ individual quirky or idiosyncratic tags (e.g., “Han Solo Needs a Hug”) to standardized tags (“Emotional Hurt/Comfort”), maintaining discoverability without policing creativity.

This system is not dissimilar to the iterative work already done by metadata librarians, who refine and connect descriptors to enhance discoverability in scholarly databases. What AO3 adds is visibility, community participation, and a user-driven orientation at the point of content creation.

What Scholarly Publishing Could Learn

A More Flexible and Inclusive Metadata System

Rather than imposing rigid, discipline-based taxonomies and controlled vocabulary, scholars could apply rich, user-generated tags to describe their research: from methods (e.g. autoethnography, Critical Race Theory) to modes (data visualisation, podcast, creative writing) or even ethical framings (community based, anti-colonial, open pedagogy). Research outputs could be tagged with multiple intersecting fields, facilitating interdisciplinary exchange and breaking down traditional silos.

Tags could also be used to signal expertise, peer review availability, research interests, and collaborative openness. Researchers might tag their work or profiles with natural language that reflects how they think, speak, or seek: “Anyone up for collaborating on a project looking at library UX?” or “Working on open pedagogy zine, who wants to help?”

Behind the scenes, volunteer metadata wranglers (potentially librarians or metadata-savvy scholars) could map these free-text tags to canonical, searchable categories such as: [seeking:collaborators], [interest:user experience], or [peer review: available/unavailable]. This mapping would be invisible to the casual user but crucial for search, filtering, alerts, and recommendations.

For example:

This approach would make invisible labor visible, foreground scholars’ intellectual identities, and enable new forms of collaboration, especially across disciplines or institutions. It would also facilitate a more inclusive scholarly ecosystem in which language used by marginalized or non-dominant groups was linked and respected, rather than forced to conform to dominant language or discipline norms.

Rethinking Peer Review

Other platforms, like PubPeer, have experimented with anonymous or open review, sometimes with mixed results. AO3’s “collections” feature—which groups works according to themes, categories, even seasonal events, and can be configured to be open, moderated, or anonymous—offers a flexible template that suggests a way for communities to choose the review structures that best support their work.

Imagine journals functioning as themed collections with different workflows:

• Open collections would allow immediate publication and post-publication review through public comments.
• Moderated unrevealed collections would mimic double-blind peer review, with work made public only after approval.
• Anonymous collections would enable critical feedback without fear of retaliation, especially valuable for early-career researchers or controversial topics.

The commenting feature on AO3 also allows users to engage directly with works, offering a low-barrier, asynchronous space for feedback and dialogue, a feature often sorely lacking in traditional academic publishing.

Supporting Diverse Scholarly Outputs

AO3 is deliberately format agnostic. It hosts multi-chapter epics, flash fiction, visual art, audio recordings, all side by side. A scholarly counterpart could support not just peer-reviewed articles, but datasets, code, pedagogical resources, zines, interactive maps, or performative research. Rather than forcing knowledge of any kind into an 8,000-word PDF, scholars could choose the most effective medium for their message.

Reimagining Recognition and Reputation

AO3 users can leave “kudos” on a work: a simple click to say, “I liked this.” Kudos ratings also feature as a means of filtering and sorting works. Imagine if academic publishing offered something similar: lightweight, non-hierarchical signals of appreciation for a well-curated dataset, an insightful literature review, or a generous peer review. Such systems could help bring visibility to forms of scholarly labor that traditional citation metrics tend to ignore.

AO3 also allows users to maintain pseudonymous identities linked to a single account, known as “pseuds.” In academia, this practice could address real problems around name changes (e.g. due to marriage, transition, or safety), allowing all works by an author to be linked via a persistent ID (e.g., ORCID), while maintaining the name under which it was published.

What Would It Take to Build This?

Of course, adapting AO3 for scholarly communication isn’t as simple as cloning its interface. There are real challenges to consider:

• Quality Assurance: AO3 handles trolling and disruptive behavior through clear moderation policies and active volunteer oversight. Comparable systems would be needed in academia, especially to counter risks like paper mills or manipulated submissions. Platforms like PubPub and Humanities Commons already experiment with such models.
• Copyright and Licensing: Clear licensing (e.g. Creative Commons) would enable reuse while respecting authors’ rights.
• Sustainability: AO3 is entirely funded by donations, a model that may not scale to the needs of a global research platform. A review of AO3’s annual budget makes clear that it runs on less than a single academic institution expends annually on subscription fees and publishing charges. Hybrid models involving institutional support, grants, and community fundraising may be needed. Crucially, AO3 publishes its budget spreadsheet openly—a model of financial transparency that academic platforms could emulate.
• Integration: Any new platform would need to interface with existing infrastructure: ORCID, indexing services, institutional repositories, and funder mandates.
• AI Exploitation: As commercial AI companies increasingly scrape digital repositories, safeguards would be needed to prevent extraction without consent or benefit sharing. AO3 content can be “locked,” requiring users to register in order to access.

None of these challenges are insurmountable. Projects like the Open Library of Humanities, SciPost, and OSF have shown that alternatives to traditional scholarly publishing are not only possible, they’re already working. AO3 suggests a way to combine the best elements of these dispersed projects: open peer commentary (PubPeer), volunteer-driven labor (diamond OA), community metadata (librarianship), and inclusive formats (Knowledge Commons). The challenge is scaling them, resourcing them, and most importantly, changing the culture to support them.

OTW’s own journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, demonstrates how volunteer-run diamond OA publishing can work, though it does not incorporate many of AO3’s participatory features. What if it did?

Toward a More Equitable Scholarly Communications System

The idea isn’t to replace all journals with a single fanfic-style archive, nor to romanticize fan culture. Rather, it’s to ask: what if we designed our scholarly communication systems to reflect our values of openness, equity, and participation, instead of replicating institutional constraints?

AO3 reminds us that platforms can be built by and for communities, without extractive profit models or exclusionary hierarchies. It shows what’s possible when infrastructure is treated as a public good, and when participation is scaffolded, not gated. And crucially, AO3 demonstrates how practices that have been piloted in isolation across the scholarly landscape—open peer commentary, volunteer governance, flexible metadata, inclusive formats—can be woven together into a single, sustainable system.

As researchers, publishers, and librarians, we have the tools and expertise to build something better. What we need now is the imagination, and the collective will, to make it happen.