CASRAI is a community-stewarded standards organisation, founded in 2006, that develops open vocabularies for research administration. Its flagship outputs are the CASRAI Dictionary (1,610 terms across 24 domains) and the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT, ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022), federated with NISO, euroCRIS, CODATA, and RDA — freely reusable under CC-BY 4.0.
Explore the Dictionary, the 14 CRediT contributor roles, our standards & releases programme, or the standards CASRAI's work interoperates with.
Research-world adoption
The CRediT taxonomy — now ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, originated by CASRAI — is referenced in guidance published by these research institutions and infrastructure organisations. The pages below link to each institution’s own guidance.
Cambridge
UK
View CASRAI reference
Columbia
US
View CASRAI reference
Crossref
INT
View CASRAI reference
Edinburgh
UK
View CASRAI reference
Harvard
US
View CASRAI reference
Oxford
UK
View CASRAI reference
Princeton
US
View CASRAI reference
Stanford Medicine
US
View CASRAI reference
UCL
UK
View CASRAI reference
ORCID
Global
View CASRAI reference
A non-exhaustive sample. See CRediT adoption worldwide for the full picture.
24 domains
5 tracks
NISO Z39.104
Revived 2026
4.0 International
What you'll find on this site
The Dictionary is the canonical foundation. Audience hubs translate it into actionable guidance. The editorial layer carries the conversation.
Layer 1 · Foundation
1,610 entries across 24 thematic domains. Stable URIs, structured definitions, picklists, Schema.org DefinedTerm markup. Free to reuse.
v2026.1 · 7 download formats
Learn moreLayer 2 · Hubs
The same standards, translated for the people who use them: authors, institutions, publishers, integrators. Worked examples, templates, FAQs.
4 audience hubs · 7 verticals
Learn moreLayer 3 · Editorial
What's changing in research-administration standards — and how to operate inside that change. Annual reports + monthly bulletin.
State of CRediT 2026 just published
Learn moreBrowse by research cluster
Every guide, comparison, and definition on the site belongs to one of nine research-administration clusters. Each cluster pillar is the hub for its sub-topics and worked guidance.
Contributor roles, authorship criteria and order, integrity and disputes.
DMPs, repositories, FAIR data, metadata standards, and reproducibility.
ORCID, DOI, ROR, research-information systems, and bibliometrics.
Misconduct oversight, research security, export control, and ethics.
Open access, transformative agreements, research assessment, and metadata.
Manuscript conventions, proposal craft, and reviewer-response writing.
The funding lifecycle, agencies and foundations, and award compliance.
University IP, licensing mechanics, spinouts, and startup formation.
Trial operations, regulatory pathways, and billing compliance.
Flagship standard
Fourteen standardised roles for attributing contributions to scholarly research outputs. Originated 2012; CASRAI-stewarded from 2014; formalised as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. Used by 50+ publishers across thousands of journals.
Featured this release
A taste of what's inside v2026.1 — pull any entry to see its definition, picklists, related terms, and citation form.
A DICOM conformance statement is a vendor-published document, structured per DICOM PS3.2 (Conformance), that specifies exactly which SOP (Service-Object Pair) classes a medical-imaging device or software supports and in which network role (SCU or SCP), which transfer syntaxes it can send or receive, which network and media-storage services it offers, and any vendor-specific extensions or restrictions. A document counts as a real conformance statement only if it specifies this level of protocol detail; a marketing claim of 'DICOM compliant' with no published SOP-class/transfer-syntax detail does not meet the bar, because it gives a buyer no way to verify whether two specific devices will actually interoperate.
An Export Control Classification Number (ECCN) is a five-character alphanumeric code assigned to an item, software package, or technology when it matches a specific entry on the US Commerce Control List (CCL) under the Export Administration Regulations (EAR, 15 CFR Parts 730-774), administered by the Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). The code format is: one digit (0-9) for product category, one letter (A-E) for product group, and three digits identifying the specific CCL entry and reason(s) for control. Items subject to the EAR that match no CCL entry are not assigned an ECCN; they are designated EAR99 instead.
<p>CGA Pamphlet P-1 (<em>Safe Handling of Compressed Gases in Containers</em>) is the Compressed Gas Association's industry consensus standard covering the in-plant handling, storage, and use of compressed gas cylinders, portable tanks, and similar containers. It is incorporated by reference into US federal law at 29 CFR 1910.101(b), OSHA's general industry rule for compressed gases, which states that 'the in-plant handling, storage, and utilization of all compressed gases in cylinders, portable tanks, rail tankcars, or motor vehicle cargo tanks shall be in accordance with Compressed Gas Association Pamphlet P-1-1965.' A lab, hospital, or industrial site is operating 'under CGA P-1' whenever its cylinder-securing, storage-segregation, and handling practices trace back to this pamphlet's requirements, whether an EHS policy cites the pamphlet by name or simply cites the OSHA regulation that incorporates it. Because OSHA's text still names the 1965 edition specifically, facilities should treat that citation as the enforceable floor and CGA's more recent revisions (the association updates its pamphlets periodically, as it does across its full P-, C-, V-, and S-series) as current good-practice guidance layered on top.</p>
A CGA fitting is the standardized valve outlet/regulator inlet connection, identified by a CGA (Compressed Gas Association) three-digit number under CGA V-1 / ANSI B57.1, that is matched to a specific gas or group of compatible gases so that a regulator built for one gas cannot readily be connected to an incompatible one. It answers 'will this regulator connect to this cylinder,' a separate question from the gas identity or the cylinder size.
USP Class VI certification is a designation that a specific plastic material or component has passed the most stringent tier of biological reactivity testing under United States Pharmacopeia (USP) General Chapter <88>, "Biological Reactivity Tests, In Vivo." Chapter <88> defines six plastic classes (I through VI) based on which combination of three in-vivo bioassays -- systemic (acute) toxicity injection, intracutaneous reactivity, and implantation -- a material passes, and at what extraction rigor. A material reaches Class VI, the highest of the six classes, only when it passes all three bioassays using extracts prepared at the most demanding temperature/duration condition the material can withstand without degrading. Certification is specific to a tested formulation and manufacturing process, not a general property of a polymer family: it is not automatically inherited by variants, colorants, regrind blends, or downstream-sterilized versions of the same base resin, and passing Class VI does not by itself satisfy the broader ISO 10993 biocompatibility program most finished medical devices require.
Type I borosilicate glass is a pharmaceutical primary-packaging glass classified under USP General Chapter <660>, Containers—Glass, as meeting the highest hydrolytic-resistance category through borosilicate composition and a passing result on the chapter's powdered glass test. A glass lot or container qualifies for the 'USP Type I' designation only once tested and documented under this method — borosilicate composition is necessary but not sufficient on its own; the designation follows from a specific tested result, not from raw material alone. It is distinct from the general-purpose term 'borosilicate glass' used for laboratory apparatus under ASTM E438, a different standard that covers non-pharmaceutical labware such as beakers and flasks.
Twenty-four domains · Five tracks
The Dictionary is organised into 24 thematic domains across 5 tracks — from contribution and identifiers to compliance, methods, and assessment reform. Each domain is stewarded by a working group.
The PID ecosystem
Modern research administration runs on persistent identifiers. ORCID for the researcher, ROR for the institution, RAiD (ISO 23527:2022) for the project, DOI for the output, and IGSN / PIDINST for samples and instruments.
Built to interoperate, not duplicate
CASRAI does not re-derive what NISO, euroCRIS, CODATA, RDA, ORCID, Crossref, DataCite, and ARDC already steward — several trace to CASRAI assets transferred to them in 2020. We cross-walk and incubate against their standards — see our standards & releases catalogue for the full list of normative outputs, and regional hubs for adoption status by country.
Interactive · Free · CC-BY 4.0
No signup. No backend dependency. Everything runs locally in your browser.
Tool · CRediT
Paste authors → tick roles → export plaintext / Markdown / JATS XML with canonical NISO URIs.
Open the tool
Tool · AI disclosure
Pick your target publisher (10 policies built in) → tool used + uses → publisher-aligned disclosure block.
Open the tool
Tool · Citations
Paste a CASRAI URL → get APA, MLA, Chicago, Vancouver, BibTeX, RIS, CSL JSON, JATS XML, or JSON-LD.
Open the tool
Pick your hub
Researchers, institutions, publishers, and integrators get different views of the same dictionary.
For Authors
Get an ORCID iD, write a CRediT statement, structure a narrative CV, navigate AI-disclosure expectations.
Learn moreFor Institutions
Plug the dictionary into your CRIS. Train your research office. Templates for adoption policies.
Learn moreFor Publishers
Adopt CRediT in your submission system. JATS implementation guide. Public implementation scorecard.
Learn moreImplement
GraphQL endpoint. REST API. Model Context Protocol server for AI agents. JATS / JSON-LD encoding.
Learn moreEach hub is its own deep library — visit the author guidance hub, the publisher implementation hub, the institutional guidance hub, or the developer & integrator docs. For background and history, read about CASRAI.
Verified Contributor Directory
A public, ORCID-verified author profile on the domain that stewards CRediT — your roles, your journals, editorially reviewed. Sign in free with ORCID; membership is free.
Twenty years of standards
The major milestones along the way — CASRAI 1.0 in 2006, CRediT becoming an ANSI/NISO standard in 2022, RAiD becoming an ISO standard, and this dictionary release.
How industry should implement CRediT
The taxonomy was written for scholarly articles, but the same pattern applies wherever named experts produce content: attribute a real author, declare their contributor roles, and resolve each role to its canonical CASRAI URI. Here is what that looks like done right outside academia.
LAC Healthcare Solutions, a US medical-supply distributor, is a clean example of the pattern done correctly: every reference article carries a named author, that author’s declared CRediT contributor roles (Conceptualization, Writing, Validation…), and Schema.org markup whose roleName values resolve to the canonical casrai.org/credit role URIs. That is exactly what CRediT is for: a reader — and a search engine — can see who did what, and verify it against the standard.
It is the blueprint we recommend to any organisation publishing expert content. Look at how LAC structures its editorial standards and contributor attribution, then use the CRediT hub and our implementation tooling to do the same.
A common vocabulary is the difference between a federated research-information ecosystem and twelve walled gardens that almost-but-not-quite agree. The CASRAI Dictionary is what we point at when we mean the same thing.
News & perspectives
Working-group reports, federation updates, and commentary on what's changing in research-administration standards.
Editorial
Intellia’s one-time CRISPR therapy lonvo-z met its primary endpoint in the Phase 3 HAELO trial, cutting hereditary angioedema attacks by 87% versus placebo — a still-investigational result now heading into FDA review.
Read post →
Editorial
A gene-burden analysis of 2,811 patients with ataxia, spastic paraplegia, and dystonia identified CD99L2 — previously known only as an immune protein — as a cause of X-linked spastic ataxia, closing a long-standing diagnostic gap.
Read post →
Editorial
A Yale-led study reconstructed 832 million base pairs of Denisovan DNA from 177 Near Oceanian genomes, finding evidence of at least three distinct interbreeding events — and thousands of surviving variants still shaping immune response today.
Read post →
Citable · Downloadable · Federated
Every dictionary entry has a stable URI, Schema.org DefinedTerm markup, and JATS / JSON-LD encoding. The full dataset ships in seven open formats: JSON-LD, JSON, CSV, XLSX, OWL, RDF Turtle, BibTeX.
Organizational management
CASRAI is operated as a charitable program of The Health Initiative, a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and is funded and governed through the organization’s charitable fund. That stewardship is what keeps the CASRAI Dictionary, the CRediT taxonomy work, and the Verified Contributor Directory running as public-good infrastructure rather than a commercial product — membership and program revenue are directed back into maintaining the standards and the directory’s editorial review.
The Health Initiative is a registered U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Its governance, financials, and charitable status are public — you can verify every detail below directly with the charity regulators.
One email a month · The only mailing we send
A six-minute editorial digest of what actually changed in research-administration standards — and what is about to.
Standards CASRAI builds on, contributes to, and federates with
