Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A funder's data-sharing policy citing the FAIR Guiding Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) as its standard for what counts as a properly shared dataset -- FAIR was published in 2016 by an international group working through FORCE11 and remains one of its most widely adopted outputs.
- Is an instance
A biomedical journal requiring authors to cite antibodies and cell lines using a resolvable RRID (Research Resource Identifier) in the methods section -- RRIDs were developed through FORCE11's Resource Identification Initiative, launched with a 2014 pilot across roughly 25 journals and now used in over a thousand.
- Is an instance
A research-software team adding a CITATION.cff file to a GitHub repository so the package can be cited with a version, persistent identifier, and named contributors -- this practice follows the Software Citation Principles that FORCE11's Software Citation Working Group published in 2016.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A university press release describing its open-access mandate as being 'in the spirit of FORCE11' with no reference to a specific FORCE11-convened principle, working group, or declaration -- broad philosophical alignment with open scholarship is not the same as adopting a named FORCE11 output such as FAIR, the data citation principles, or RRIDs.
- Not an instance
A publisher claiming CRediT itself as 'a FORCE11 standard' -- CRediT's own origin traces to a 2012 Wellcome Trust/Harvard University workshop and a subsequent pilot with biomedical journal editors and ICMJE members, was stewarded by CASRAI from its 2014 publication until 2022, and is now the ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 standard maintained by NISO; FORCE11 is a closely related community whose Attribution Working Group continues to engage with contributor-roles questions, but CRediT did not originate as a FORCE11 working-group output the way FAIR, RRIDs, or the data/software citation principles did.
Editorial commentary
FORCE11 — the Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship — describes itself as “a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing,” with more than 2,000 members worldwide spanning researchers, students, librarians, publishers, funding officers, and infrastructure providers. It operates as a grassroots, community-governed nonprofit rather than a formal standards-development organization with accredited voting membership — its influence comes from convening working groups that produce widely-adopted principles and specifications, which other bodies (NISO, DataCite, individual publishers and funders) then formalize or operationalize.
What FORCE11 actually produces
FORCE11’s best-documented, most widely cited outputs are community declarations and specifications built through its working groups, including the FAIR Guiding Principles for data (and, in extended form, research software), the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles (2014), the Software Citation Principles (2016), and the Resource Identification Initiative that produced the RRID system for citing antibodies, cell lines, model organisms, and software tools. FORCE11 also runs FSCI, an annual summer training institute in scholarly communication, and hosts community discussion through its Upstream blog and annual FORCE conference.
FORCE11 and CRediT: a closely related but distinct history
Because FORCE11’s mission — recognizing the full range of work that goes into research, not just the words in a published article — overlaps so directly with the goals of CRediT (the Contributor Roles Taxonomy), the two are frequently conflated. The more precise history is that CRediT originated at a workshop co-hosted by the Wellcome Trust and Harvard University in May 2012, which led to a pilot project developed with a group of biomedical journal editors and members of the ICMJE. CRediT was introduced to the wider scholarly community in a 2014 Nature paper (Allen, Brand, Scott, Altman, and Hlava) and was stewarded as a community vocabulary by CASRAI from 2014 until ANSI approved it as a formal national standard — ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 — on 8 February 2022, after which NISO took over primary maintenance. FORCE11 is not CRediT’s formal originating or stewarding body in that chain. What connects the two organizations is that FORCE11 has continued to serve as an active community venue for contributor-roles work adjacent to CRediT — its Attribution Working Group, for example, has run workshops examining the ethics of contributor-role assignment — and both sit within the same broader reform movement aimed at making scholarly credit more granular, accurate, and inclusive of non-traditional contributions.
Reward systems beyond the traditional publication
The throughline across FORCE11’s initiatives is a shared premise: the traditional unit of scholarly reward — authorship on a journal article, evaluated largely through citation counts and journal prestige — systematically undercounts the labor that makes research possible. Cleaning and documenting a dataset, maintaining a software package, curating a biological resource, or peer reviewing a manuscript are each real contributions that FAIR, the data and software citation principles, and RRIDs were each built to make citable, attributable, and therefore count-able in the way a traditional publication already is. This is the same underlying problem CRediT addresses for authorship on a specific paper, and the same problem that broader research-assessment reform efforts (such as the push against perverse incentives in narrow, citation-count-driven evaluation) are trying to solve at the institutional-policy level. FORCE11’s role in this landscape is less a single standard and more a persistent community forum where the practical mechanics of recognizing diverse scholarly contributions — data, software, resources, review, and authorship roles alike — get worked out and tested before other bodies adopt them formally.
Related terms
See also CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy), RRID, Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles, Software Citation (Software Citation Working Group), FAIR4RS Software Citation Principles, and open-data contribution.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="FORCE11 (Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship)"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/force11" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/force11",
"name": "FORCE11 (Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship)",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/force11",
"description": "FORCE11 (Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship) is a global, member-driven nonprofit community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers, and research funders working to make scholarly communication more open, transparent, and reusable across every stage of the research lifecycle -- not only the final journal article. An initiative qualifies as FORCE11's work if it was developed through one of its working groups or endorsed community declarations (for example the FAIR Guiding Principles, the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles, the Software Citation Principles, or the Resource Identification Initiative behind RRIDs) and carries FORCE11's name as convener or co-convener, as opposed to work that merely cites or is philosophically aligned with FORCE11's broader open-scholarship goals without having gone through its community process.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/credit-extensions#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/force11",
"sameAs": [],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"dateModified": "2026-07-18T06:30:52",
"inLanguage": "en"
}
