Michael Forster is a recently retired publishing industry executive with long experience leading and formulating strategy for both commercial and membership society organizations. In senior roles with Elsevier, Wiley, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) he was responsible for journals, books, lab protocols, A&I services, databases, publishing technology, platform, and software development activities, living and working in the UK, the US, and Germany.

Selected accomplishments include the deployment of searchable chemistry in online journal articles, automation of chemical taxonomy use, integration of software preservation in article publication, and launch of AI-based synthetic pathway planning. He is focused on ensuring that publishers understand the research workflow and provide tools and products that integrate with it successfully; for more than 15 years this has meant providing leadership around research reproducibility, data preservation, and open access.

He has served as chair of CHORUS, with the boards of CrossRef and GlobalSpec, and on committees of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers and the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. He received B.A. (Hons) and M.Eng. degrees from the University of Oxford.