Open Arts Forum is building practical publishing and creative-work tools for writers and artists: tools for preparing books, presenting your work, submitting, sharing, and participating in a community built around the work itself.
Open Arts Forum has always been something I wanted people to be able to use without a paywall around the basic community. That is not changing. But we are also building tools that can save writers and artists real time—especially the tedious work around publishing, formatting, presenting, and managing creative work.
My aim is to make support reciprocal. If these tools are useful to you, supporter access helps pay for OAF's hosting, development, and continued independence. In return, supporters get access to a toolset that can keep growing as we build it.
— Jay Dougherty, Managing Editor
Build books, chapbooks, art and photography books, broadsides, digital collections, and other publication projects from your own OAF work. Arrange pieces by drag and drop, preserve publication snapshots, add front and back matter, prepare a cover, run production checks, and export finished files without rebuilding the project in several different programs.
Your creative work remains yours. The optional publishing assistant is designed for publishing tasks such as metadata, ordering, descriptions, and cover copy—not for rewriting or extending your creative work.
Submit work for editorial consideration, workshop drafts, and get feedback from other members. Forum submissions remain visible only to editors and registered members unless selected for public publication.
How submission works →Add a photo and biography, then let OAF gather your published work into a discoverable author or artist presence. Your own website remains your home; this is your publication record inside OAF.
Browse Authors & Artists →Use the OAF resource library for publications, downloads, and materials shared with the community. We will use this area as one home for new member resources as they are added.
Open resources →The tools below are separate, versioned OAF/Open Arts Press projects. Their status is shown plainly so members can tell the difference between working software, controlled-test builds, and future ideas.
The supporter-facing dashboard that brings independent OAF tools together under Create, Publish, Promote, and Improve, while keeping payment logic separate from the tools themselves.
Books, chapbooks, art books, broadsides and digital collections with arrangement, design, cover, preflight and multi-format export.
Microphone dictation directly in the forum editor, with live recording feedback and configurable transcription providers. Usage limits can reflect real transcription/API cost.
A contributor-reading workflow for invitations, browser recording or upload, editorial review, transcripts, publication, listening archives and podcast-ready feeds.
A structured written-interview workflow with manual or AI-assisted question preparation, private response forms, editorial review and controlled publication.
Renewal pays for another period of access to maintained software, fixes and improvements, plus new tools. Where AI, transcription, image generation or rendering has a real marginal cost, Studio can expose transparent allowances instead of inventing arbitrary premium tiers.
One-time support remains welcome and separate. A one-time contribution helps OAF continue, but ongoing tool access should be tied to an active supporter term so the renewal has a clear reason to exist. Support OAF now without buying tool access →
You would not be giving again just to keep the same badge. A renewal is another period of access to maintained software: the tools you already use, compatibility fixes, improvements, and whatever new tools have been added to the supporter area. If that stops being useful, cancel.
Publishers have a different set of repetitive problems. We should treat that as a separate product line rather than complicate the writer-and-artist membership.
No. The forum, basic participation, free submission/workshopping, and core community remain available with a free account. Supporter Tools is an optional layer for higher-value production tools.
The access model should be simple: supporter-only software access ends at the end of the paid term. Your exported files remain yours. Before launch, we will define how saved online projects remain available for export or read-only access after cancellation.
Some publishing programs charge once. OAF's model is different: supporter access helps sustain the community and a growing set of hosted tools that require ongoing development, storage, maintenance, APIs, and server resources. The subscription only makes sense if that ongoing value continues.
Not necessarily. Publisher workflows serve journals and presses rather than individual creators, so they should be designed and priced separately if we build them.
Publishing creative work and building a community around writers, artists, readers, and editors.