Initiated in 2011 as a community of interest on scholarly communication, FORCE11 is a registered 501(c)(3) organization based in the United States but with members and partners around the world.

Key activities include an annual conference, the Scholarly Communications Institute and a range of working groups.

FORCE11 grew out of the FORC Workshop held in Dagstuhl, Germany in August 2011.

[1] This meeting resulted in the collaborative creation of a white paper[2] which summarized the problems of scholarly communication and proposed a vision to address them.

Through various working groups FORCE11 has undertaken a range of activities to improve the standards, interoperability and functionality of digital research communications and developed various statements on principles and policies for best practice.