The project of this compilation was undertaken by the Euler Committee of the Swiss Academy of Sciences, established in 1908, and is ongoing as of September 2022[update].

The Committee decided on "the edition of the Collected Works of Leonhard Euler in the original languages, convinced of rendering the entire scientific world a service thereby",[1] and, in 1919, it indicated to collect “All works from Leonhard Euler, hitherto unseen or already printed, coming from St Petersburg or elsewhere need to be integrated.

In the second part of the 20th century, it became more difficult to find qualified editors who could work with the Latin texts and German Kurrent handwriting.

In 2005, the Committee decided that the final volumes would be digitalized rather than printed, and that, eventually, the whole Opera Omnia would be online for easy access.

The Opera-Bernoulli-Euler project also planned to retrodigitize the already published content from the Opera Omnia and link it with the Eneström index so it would be easily accessible and searchable.