Since 2011 the international joint research project "1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War" has been developing an English-language virtual reference work on the First World War. Released in October 2014, the online encyclopedia is the result of an international collaborative project to make available a multi-perspective, public-access knowledge base on the First World War. "1914-1918-online" represents a major undertaking under the Open Access paradigm by promoting free and unlimited dissemination of the content to individual users, search engines, and reference services.

The project has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). It was carried out by the Department of Modern History at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute of Freie Universität Berlin (FMI) in cooperation with the Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS) and the Bavarian State Library (BSB). It is led by Prof. Oliver Janz who is also the encyclopedia’s editor-in-chief.

The FMI is responsible for the project management as well as the encyclopedia’s conceptual planning and realization. The encyclopedia’s editorial office is also based here.

CeDiS is in charge of the IT architecture, the conceptualization and incorporation of Semantic Web features and the encyclopedia’s web-publishing as well as the technical support for both the authoring and the reviewing processes.

The BSB is responsible for the subject indexing and oversees the encyclopedia’s long-term archiving and preservation.

Since March 2016, “1914-1918-online” was enhanced with additional functionalities. This was part of the DFG-project “Open Encyclopedia System”, which was carried out together with the Center for Digital Systems, the Center for Modern Greece and the Bavarian State Library. The core areas of this expansion included the updating of electronic publications and a Call for Papers.