Empowering eyewitnesses to preserve truth to power

Anyone with a phone can expose global injustice. OpenArchive helps history's first responders safely store, verify, and share critical evidence. We conduct co-research, build tools, and create guides that advance human rights every day.

Radical Archiving in practice

OpenArchive is dedicated to protecting media freedom: preserving, amplifying, and securely routing mobile media to community-maintained collections in accessible public and private archives, outside the corporate walled gardens currently dominating the online media ecosystem.

About us

Our impact

Bolster Free Speech

We help those at risk safely share media without fear of retribution, targeting, and other malicious attacks.

Empower Communities

We equip communities with the tools and resources to preserve evidentiary media to exact accountability and justice.

Protect Sources and Media

Our tools and guides mitigate surveillance, interception, misuse, and media manipulation.

Create Standards

We work at the forefront of digital freedom, contributing research and emergent best practices for archiving sensitive mobile media.

Our projects

Save app

Save helps eyewitnesses preserve, protect, authenticate and amplify crucial records of human rights abuses. Download Save for iOS and Android.

Guides

Explore our guides and toolkits to learn how to preserve evidence of global injustice and combat disinformation.

Research

Our work is a result of more than a decade of applied research and collaboration with at-risk communities and human rights defense organizations around the world.

Who we serve

Citizen reporters • Eyewitnesses • Activists • Documentarians • Human Rights Defenders • Legal Advocates • Academics Media • Organizations • Archivists • Librarians • Historians

Anna

Archivist at HRW

Social media and messaging apps compress audio and video before upload, which is not an option for our work.

Darius

Freelance Videographer

I don’t always capture media from professional cameras. I use my iPhone when I need to be discreet.

Ivan

Project Coordinator at KHPG

Kai

Researcher at HRW

In the past, I would have transferred data to my laptop and uploaded it from there, but I don't do that anymore. I only upload media from my mobile device now.

Nadia

Documenter at KHPG partner organization

Oleksandra

Documenter and database manager at KHPG

Anna

Archivist at HRW

Social media and messaging apps compress audio and video before upload, which is not an option for our work.

Darius

Freelance Videographer

I don’t always capture media from professional cameras. I use my iPhone when I need to be discreet.

Ivan

Project Coordinator at KHPG

Kai

Researcher at HRW

In the past, I would have transferred data to my laptop and uploaded it from there, but I don't do that anymore. I only upload media from my mobile device now.

Nadia

Documenter at KHPG partner organization

Oleksandra

Documenter and database manager at KHPG

Testimonials

The Save app fills a long-standing need to provide secure, fully encrypted and self-hosted file transfer for our staff all over the world. OpenArchive carefully listened to our needs, built an intuitive app, and tailored its features to make human rights data safer, and my job a whole lot easier.

Nicole Martin

Senior Manager of Archives and Digital Systems at Human Rights Watch

hrw.org

We must bring justice to the Ukrainian victims of Russian atrocities. It is crucial to document these horrific war crimes and ensure we preserve and verify this evidence effectively and securely. OpenArchive is playing a critical role to help us bolster this process. With their help, we are able to implement more streamlined ways to document war crimes with new technologies and create a more robust and secure archive. Our partnership is invaluable!