Force11 Scholarly Communication Institute

Force11 Scholarly Communication Institute
Name	Force11 Scholarly Communication Institute
Established	2017
Location	Various (United States)
Type	Professional development institute
Parent	Force11

Force11 Scholarly Communication Institute is an annual professional development program for researchers, librarians, publishers, and technologists focused on scholarly communication practices. Founded in 2017, the institute convenes participants at academic conferences, research centers, and cultural institutions to address evolving norms in publishing, repositories, and data stewardship. The institute draws on contributors from universities, foundations, and standards bodies to deliver short courses, tutorials, and hands-on sessions aimed at improving reproducibility, openness, and infrastructure.

History

The institute originated during discussions among members of the Force11 community, with early planning linked to gatherings that included representatives from National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Initial programming took cues from precedent events such as the OpenCon meetings, the Research Data Alliance plenaries, and workshops hosted by European Science Foundation and Digital Science. Early cohorts included instructors affiliated with Harvard University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Cambridge, Stanford University, and MIT, and drew comparisons to training models from Carpentries and Software Carpentry. Over successive years the institute expanded connections with stakeholders like Crossref, ORCID, DataCite, and SPARC while adapting to remote delivery during public health events that affected gatherings like American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings and Society for Scholarly Publishing conferences.

Mission and Objectives

The institute's mission aligns with principles advocated by organizations such as Committee on Publication Ethics, International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, Public Library of Science, eLife, and PeerJ to advance transparent research communication. Objectives emphasize training practitioners from institutions including University of Oxford, University of Toronto, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Melbourne in topics promoted by Plan S, FAIR Principles, Confederation of Open Access Repositories, and OpenAIRE. The program seeks to empower participants with skills found in resources from National Library of Medicine, Library of Congress, British Library, German National Library, and Australian National University to steward scholarly outputs across infrastructures like Zenodo, Figshare, Dataverse, and Dryad.

Programs and Curriculum

Curriculum modules cover areas reflected in standards from ISO, W3C, NISO, RDA, and Dublin Core and techniques used by teams at Microsoft Research, Google Research, Amazon Web Services, IBM Research, and Space Telescope Science Institute. Courses address metadata practices seen at PubMed Central, arXiv, bioRxiv, ChemRxiv, and medRxiv; persistent identifiers used by Digital Object Identifier, ORCID iD, ISNI; and licensing approaches advocated by Creative Commons, SPARC Europe, Budapest Open Access Initiative, and Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Advanced offerings explore reproducible workflows inspired by projects at Galaxy Project, Jupyter Project, RStudio, Nextflow, and GitHub, and policy implications connected to Horizon Europe, U.S. OSTP memo, NIH Public Access Policy, and Wellcome Trust policy.

Workshops and Training Formats

Workshops employ pedagogies similar to those used by Carpentries, ALA, Special Libraries Association, International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology, and Association of Research Libraries, combining lectures, hackathons, and collaborative labs. Formats include short courses, bootcamps, and intensive seminars modeled after National Academies colloquia, Sloan Foundation institutes, and Digital Humanities schools. Practical sessions replicate workflows from platforms such as GitLab, Bitbucket, Open Journal Systems, and Scholastica while using case studies referencing work at Nature Research, Science (journal), The Lancet, and PLOS Biology.

Governance and Funding

Governance draws on nonprofit and volunteer structures similar to Force11, SPARC, RIKEN, European Research Council, and Association of American Universities, with advisory input from leaders at NIH, NSF, USDA, UK Research and Innovation, and NWO (Netherlands). Funding sources have included grants and sponsorships from organizations like Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Gates Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and corporate partners such as Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Digital Science. Financial stewardship and program oversight have been informed by models used by Council on Library and Information Resources and Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Impact and Notable Outcomes

Alumni have launched initiatives and published guidance reflecting practices promoted by the institute, influencing repositories such as Zenodo and policy documents from ERC, NIH Office of Science Policy, and COAR. Notable outcomes include curricular adoption at institutions like University of Edinburgh, University of Washington, Peking University, Tsinghua University, and National University of Singapore, and contributions to interoperability efforts with Crossref Metadata and DataCite Commons. Participants have contributed to community standards at NISO, W3C Scholarly Link Framework, and working groups within Research Data Alliance, and alumni collaborations have produced tools interoperable with ORCID, Scholarly HTML, and Linked Data implementations adopted by libraries including New York Public Library and Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Partnerships and Community Engagement

Partnerships span learned societies and organizations such as American Chemical Society, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Royal Society, American Psychological Association, and Modern Language Association, and coordinate with infrastructure bodies like Crossref, ORCID, DataCite, COAR, and Jisc. Community engagement includes collaborations with university presses such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, University of California Press, and MIT Press and outreach to stakeholder groups including Faculty of 1000, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and regional consortia like CARL and CRKN. The institute’s network-building mirrors coalitions formed around initiatives such as Open Research Funders Group and Coalition S to accelerate adoption of open, reproducible scholarly communication practices.

Category:Scholarly communication