CASRAI is a community-stewarded standards organisation, founded in 2006, that develops open vocabularies for research administration. Its flagship outputs are the CASRAI Dictionary (1,858 terms across 29 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.
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
1,858 entries across 29 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.
Beyond scholarly authorship
Nomenclature & Index for Knowledge Ontologies, Lexicons & AI Interoperability
CASRAI’s own dictionary of elements for frontier AI safety governance, built with the same rigour as CRediT: named terms, stable URIs, Schema.org markup — crosswalked across ten tracks against the real safety frameworks and statutes named labs and regulators actually publish. Every crosswalk row is CASRAI’s own reading, clearly labelled as such, not an endorsement by the organisation it describes.
Ten tracks, one dictionary
N1–N9 crosswalk real primary documents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, Meta, the EU GPAI Code of Practice, California SB 53, and more. N10 (Assurance roles) is the one track NIKOLAI defines about itself — its own mapping-declaration governance, structurally modelled on CRediT’s ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 role pattern.
Read the changelog →A CASRAI product
Ask a real research-administration question — a 2 CFR 200 cost-allowability rule, a Federal Register notice, a funder-specific requirement — and get back an answer that links the exact passages it’s drawn from, so you can check the source yourself rather than take our word for it.
Every answer, sourced
No account needed to try it: the same sources, cited the same way. Subscribers get a higher-tier model and up to 10 source passages behind each answer. Cancel any time from your account page.
See what it can answer →Featured this release
A taste of what's inside v2026.1 — pull any entry to see its definition, picklists, related terms, and citation form.
Contemporary Clinical Trials is a peer-reviewed methodology journal published by Elsevier (Print ISSN 1551-7144, Electronic ISSN 1559-2030) dedicated to the design, conduct, statistical analysis, and regulatory governance of clinical trials. Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports (JCR) records a 2-year Journal Impact Factor of 2.0 (2023 JCR data year, released in 2024), alongside a Scopus CiteScore of 3.6. The journal is complemented by Contemporary Clinical Trials Communications, a gold open-access companion title.
Social Forces is a premier quarterly peer-reviewed journal of social research, founded in 1922 by Howard W. Odum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and published by Oxford University Press. It publishes foundational empirical and theoretical studies across sociology and related social sciences. Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports indexes the journal in the Social Sciences Citation Index, consistently ranking it in Quartile 1 (Q1) within Sociology.
Gender & Society is the official bimonthly peer-reviewed journal of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), published by SAGE Publications since 1987. It publishes critical feminist and sociological research examining gendered structures, organizations, and transnational processes. Indexed in Clarivate's Social Sciences Citation Index, its citation metrics place it consistently in Quartile 1 (Q1) within both Sociology and Women's Studies.
Sociological Theory is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by SAGE Publications on behalf of the American Sociological Association. Established in 1983, it publishes theoretical scholarship across sociological disciplines and holds a Clarivate Journal Impact Factor of 4.3 (Quartile 1). Per DORA principles, its journal-level citation metrics evaluate aggregate dissemination rather than individual article quality.
The British Journal of Sociology (BJS) is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the London School of Economics and Political Science (print ISSN 0007-1315, online ISSN 1468-4446). Founded in 1950, it publishes foundational scholarship across quantitative and qualitative sociology, holding a 2024 Journal Impact Factor of 3.3 in Clarivate's Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).
The Annual Review of Sociology is an annual peer-reviewed academic publication issued by Annual Reviews that publishes authoritative, invited literature review essays across core subfields of sociology. Tracked in the Social Sciences Citation Index, its citation metrics place it in Quartile 1 of the Sociology category.
29 domains · 6 tracks
The Dictionary is organised into 29 thematic domains across 6 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 CASRAI CRediT reference site — 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 Health, 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
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ruled out a 2026 IPO, tying the delay to AI safety and alignment work and to a nonprofit/for-profit structure he says lets the company make decisions public markets would not tolerate.
Read post →
Editorial
The US and China are building a first dedicated AI-safety channel ahead of the Sept. 24, 2026 Trump-Xi summit — no signed agreement, no formal name, and chip export controls explicitly excluded. Here’s what’s actually proposed, and why officials on both sides say not to expect a breakthrough.
Read post →
Editorial
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk told the Human Rights Council on September 7, 2026 that AI risks becoming “an existential risk to humanity,” naming two specific failure modes — an AI escaping its testing environment, and an AI blackmailing developers to avoid being shut down — and separately called for a ban on fully autonomous weapons.
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 legal name, EIN, and registered office are listed below, so its charitable status can be verified directly with the IRS.
One email a month · The CASRAI Bulletin
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
Programmes of The Health Initiative
CASRAI is one of two programmes run by The Health Initiative, a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The other is a clinical service: physician-led telehealth for people in Puerto Rico. The two are separate programmes under one organisation.
Physician-led video care, in English or Spanish
General practice physician · PR licence 24027
CASRAI’s parent 501(c)(3) nonprofit
