The Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship

Create a Group

FORCE11 provides a platform for different scholarly communities: working groups, interest groups, projects and FORCE11 committees, etc. Please fill out the form below and we'll be in touch.

Lead a FORCE11 Working Group!

Expression of interest form

The mission of FORCE11 is to improve research practices by supporting innovation in the ways knowledge and scholarly outputs are created and shared. FORCE11 provides a space for discussion and collaborative work across all research disciplines and communities, to facilitate the development and implementation of new approaches for effective digital scholarly communications.

We invite expressions of interest to create new FORCE11 Workings Groups. Is there an open science practice that you would like to drive forward? Are you part of a community with a need toward more effective or responsible digital scholarly communication? Then submit your proposal for a FORCE11 Working Group via the form below by October 4, 2024.

Working Groups may cover any area of scholarly communications and any disciplines, geographies or communities. We welcome fully fleshed out proposals or ideas for topics to tackle. We will be happy to discuss your area of interest with you to help scope the topics and activities of your Working Group.

Here are a few examples of previous FORCE11 Working Groups:

  • The Data Citation Synthesis Working Group brought together groups interested in data citation to review existing recommendations and develop a consolidated set of principles to encourage adoption of data-citation practices across disciplines and platforms. This Working Group developed the influential Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles.

  • The Open Climate Knowledge (OCK) Working Group was created with the goal to make climate-related research 100% open. A collaborative effort among researchers, the group focused on data mining open access papers related to climate change, to make this information available to researchers and develop measures of open access rates for research in this area. The group hosted a hackathon and publicly shared a corpus of articles and methodologies to mine climate research.

  • The Research Data Publishing Ethics Working Group was a collaboration between FORCE11 and COPE that brought together professionals across publishing and open data to develop best practices for handling the ethical responsibilities associated with publishing research data. The Working Group developed best practice recommendations and flowcharts that have been adopted by COPE. Members of this group participated in conferences and community events to support the dissemination of the resources, such as the World Congress on Research Integrity and COPE seminars.

How the Working Groups work

Here are some details on the framework for FORCE11 Working Groups:

    • Working Groups should be ready to start activities no later than January 2025

    • Working Groups will run for up to 18 months. After this time the expectation is for the Working Groups to sunset or to inform new Working Groups to follow up on the work completed

    • Each Working Group should have two appointed co-leads

    • Working Groups should strive to include a diverse membership, including representatives from a wide range of roles, geographies and perspectives, as relevant for the group’s topic and scope

    • Representatives of the Working Groups will present about their work at relevant FORCE11 events

    • All outputs created by the Working Groups will be shared with an open license

    • Working Groups may involve a partnership with other organization or community groups; if you are proposing a group that involves such a partnership, FORCE11 will review and confirm alignment to FORCE11’s mission and goals

What to expect from FORCE11

FORCE11 will support the setting up of the Working Groups, and community engagement and dissemination for their activities. FORCE11’s support includes:

    • Working Group information and deliverables showcased on the FORCE11 website

    • Google drive folder for collaborative work by Working Group members

    • Dissemination of Working Group activities and deliverables

    • Support in community engagement activities toward recruitment of members and the activities of the Working Group, e.g. via events or presence at the FORCE11 conference or FSCI

    • FORCE11 will waive registration fees for representatives of the Working Groups presenting at the FORCE11 conference or FSCI

Any questions? Then contact us at info@force11.org.

Group creation

Please fill out the following form to request starting a group with FORCE11.

Expression of interest form