Shared vocabularies for research administration

CASRAI is a community-stewarded standards organisation, founded in 2006, that develops open vocabularies for research administration. Its flagship outputs are the CASRAI Dictionary (714 terms across 20 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 federation partners that make federated stewardship work.

Explore the Dictionary Read the 14 CRediT roles What is CASRAI? →

v2026.1 releasedCC-BY 4.0Stewards ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 · 8 federation partners

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Research-world adoption

Adopted across the research world

CASRAI standards — CRediT, the Dictionary, the crosswalks — are referenced and adopted by research institutions worldwide. The pages below link to each institution’s own CASRAI guidance.

A non-exhaustive sample. See CRediT adoption worldwide for the full picture.

Federated with

Dictionary entries: 714; 20 domains
Thematic domains: 20; 5 tracks
CRediT roles: 14; NISO Z39.104
Federation partners: 8; NISO · euroCRIS · …
Of standards work: 20yr; Est. 2006
Open licence: CC-BY; 4.0 International

What you'll find on this site

Dictionary, hubs, editorial — one architecture

The Dictionary is the canonical foundation. Audience hubs translate it into actionable guidance. The editorial layer carries the conversation.

Layer 1 · Foundation

The CASRAI Dictionary

714 entries across 20 thematic domains. Stable URIs, structured definitions, picklists, Schema.org DefinedTerm markup. Free to reuse.

v2026.1 · 7 download formats

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Layer 2 · Hubs

Audience-specific guidance

The same standards, translated for the people who use them: authors, institutions, publishers, integrators. Worked examples, templates, FAQs.

4 audience hubs · 7 verticals

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Layer 3 · Editorial

News, perspectives, working groups

What's changing in research-administration standards — and how to operate inside that change. Annual reports + monthly bulletin.

State of CRediT 2026 just published

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Flagship standard

The Contributor Roles Taxonomy

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.

Conceptualization
Data curation
Formal analysis
Funding acquisition
Investigation
Methodology
Project administration
Resources
Software
Supervision
Validation
Visualization
Writing — original draft
Writing — review & editing

All 14 roles in detail →Statement builder ↗

Featured this release

Selected dictionary entries

A taste of what's inside v2026.1 — pull any entry to see its definition, picklists, related terms, and citation form.

Browse all 714 entries →

Dictionary termStable

Lab equipment lifecycle assessment

A structured environmental impact assessment of a laboratory instrument or equipment item across all life-cycle stages, from raw-material extraction and manufacture through use, maintenance, and end-of-life.

Sustainable research and laboratory operations· Assessment→

Dictionary termStable

Carbon accounting (research)

The systematic measurement, calculation, and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions across research activities, applying standard methodologies and emission factors to produce auditable CO2-equivalent totals.

Sustainable research and laboratory operations· Assessment→

Dictionary termStable

Scope 1 / 2 / 3 emissions (research org)

The categorisation of a research organisation's greenhouse-gas emissions following the GHG Protocol: scope 1 (direct on-site combustion), scope 2 (purchased electricity, heat, steam, cooling), and scope 3 (indirect emissions across the value chain, including procurement, commuting, travel, and waste).

Sustainable research and laboratory operations· Assessment→

Dictionary termStable

Climate impact statement (in DMP)

A structured section in a data management plan or research proposal that estimates and discusses the environmental impact of planned research activities, including travel, computing, equipment, consumables, and data storage.

Sustainable research and laboratory operations· Assessment→

Dictionary termStable

Climate-aware funding

Research funding policies and award practices that explicitly incorporate climate and environmental sustainability considerations into eligibility, proposal review, and reporting.

Sustainable research and laboratory operations· Assessment→

Dictionary termStable

Open infrastructure energy efficiency

The energy and carbon performance of shared, community-governed scholarly infrastructure (open repositories, identifier services, preservation systems), considered as part of the sustainability profile of the open scholarship ecosystem.

Sustainable research and laboratory operations· Assessment→

Twenty domains · Five tracks

The full domain map

The Dictionary is organised into 20 thematic domains across 5 tracks — from contribution and identifiers to compliance, methods, and assessment reform. Each domain is stewarded by a working group.

Track AContribution4 domains

GDGenerative AI use and disclosure CECRediT extensions and adjacent contribution vocabularies MCSMentorship, training, and career stages ROResearch outputs (expanded)

Track BIdentifiers3 domains

PIThe persistent identifier ecosystem RISResearch-information systems and integration DIResearch data infrastructure

Track CData & methods3 domains

MADMachine-actionable data management plans RReproducibility and computational research AMROAI and ML research outputs

Track DCompliance4 domains

RIResearch integrity and misconduct CRCompliance and regulatory RSResearch security IDCIndigenous data governance — CARE principles

Track EAssessment6 domains

RAResponsible research assessment KEKnowledge equity, diversity, global-south inclusion EISEngagement, impact, and SDG alignment SRSustainable research and laboratory operations FFFunding lifecycle and financial vocabulary RLResearch lifecycle stages and project metadata

All 20 domains in detail →

The PID ecosystem

Five identifiers, one research artefact

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.

ORCID — Person — required by most funders + publishers
ROR — Organisation — replacing GRID
RAiD — Project — formal ISO standard since 2022
DOI — Outputs — Crossref + DataCite + mEDRA
IGSN / PIDINST — Samples and instruments — DataCite-stewarded

→ PID stack for researchers → ORCID vs ROR vs RAiD comparison

Federation, not duplication

Our work, in concert with other standards bodies

CASRAI does not re-derive what NISO, euroCRIS, CODATA, RDA, ORCID, Crossref, DataCite, and ARDC already steward. We federate, cross-walk, and incubate — see our standards & releases catalogue for the full list of normative outputs, and regional hubs for adoption status by country.

See all federation partnerships →

Interactive · Free · CC-BY 4.0

Three tools, all browser-native

No signup. No backend dependency. Everything runs locally in your browser.

All six tools →

Tool · CRediT

Statement builder

Paste authors → tick roles → export plaintext / Markdown / JATS XML with canonical NISO URIs.

Open the tool

Tool · AI disclosure

AI disclosure helper

Pick your target publisher (10 policies built in) → tool used + uses → publisher-aligned disclosure block.

Open the tool

Tool · Citations

Citation generator

Paste a CASRAI URL → get APA, MLA, Chicago, Vancouver, BibTeX, RIS, CSL JSON, JATS XML, or JSON-LD.

Open the tool

Pick your hub

The same standards, for the people who use them

Researchers, institutions, publishers, and integrators get different views of the same dictionary.

For Authors

ORCID, CRediT, narrative CVs

Get an ORCID iD, write a CRediT statement, structure a narrative CV, navigate AI-disclosure expectations.

Learn more

For Institutions

CRIS, compliance, library practice

Plug the dictionary into your CRIS. Train your research office. Templates for adoption policies.

Learn more

For Publishers

Submission, JATS, scorecard

Adopt CRediT in your submission system. JATS implementation guide. Public implementation scorecard.

Learn more

Implement

GraphQL, REST, MCP, JATS

GraphQL endpoint. REST API. Model Context Protocol server for AI agents. JATS / JSON-LD encoding.

Learn more

Each 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.

New explainer pillars go deeper on the two foundations of the field: what authorship is — the ICMJE criteria, contributorship and CRediT — and what research administration is, covering the CRIS / RIM systems and the funding-to-reporting lifecycle CASRAI was founded to serve.

Twenty years of standards

From CASRAI 1.0 to Dictionary v2026.1

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.

Read the full history →

The 2026 chapter of that timeline is adoption beyond journals: organisations such as LAC Healthcare Solutions, a US medical-supply distributor, now apply the CRediT taxonomy and CASRAI-style controlled vocabulary to their own clinical reference content — named authors, declared contributor roles, canonical URIs. See the CRediT hub for the adoption pattern.

How industry should implement CRediT

CRediT isn't only for journals — it's how any expert publisher should credit its authors

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.

Worked example · HealthcareAdoption beyond journals

LAC Healthcare Solutions applies the CRediT taxonomy to its clinical reference content

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.

See the implementation at lac.us

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.

Editorial Board · CASRAI · Preface to Dictionary v2026.1

News & perspectives

From the editorial layer

Working-group reports, federation updates, and commentary on what's changing in research-administration standards.

All posts →

Editorial

Packaging Research Assets with RO-Crate: Lightweight Linked Data Metadata

1. Introduction to the Role of RO-Crate in Scholarly Infrastructure In the contemporary landscape of global science, open research practices, and institutional data governance, establishing robust standards is crucial. The integration of RO-Crate represents a landmark advancement in addressing long-standing hurdles in scholarly communication, administrative reporting, and metadata curation. This extensive guide provides an expert-level […]

Read post →

Editorial

The SWORD Protocol: Automating Repository Ingestion and Scholarly Deposits

1. Introduction to the Role of SWORD Protocol in Scholarly Infrastructure In the contemporary landscape of global science, open research practices, and institutional data governance, establishing robust standards is crucial. The integration of SWORD Protocol represents a landmark advancement in addressing long-standing hurdles in scholarly communication, administrative reporting, and metadata curation. This extensive guide provides […]

Read post →

Editorial

The FAIR Digital Object (FDO) Framework: Structuring Machine-Actionable Science

1. Introduction to the Role of FAIR Digital Objects in Scholarly Infrastructure In the contemporary landscape of global science, open research practices, and institutional data governance, establishing robust standards is crucial. The integration of FAIR Digital Objects represents a landmark advancement in addressing long-standing hurdles in scholarly communication, administrative reporting, and metadata curation. This extensive […]

Read post →

Citable · Downloadable · Federated

Built for academic use, not just casual reading

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.

GraphQL →Bulk downloads →MCP server →

Organizational management

Who operates CASRAI

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, independently rated nonprofit. Its governance, financials, and charitable status are public — you can verify every detail below directly with the charity regulators and rating services.

The Health Initiative →Charity Navigator profile →[email protected]

Monthly · No spam · CC-BY 4.0

The CASRAI Bulletin

New dictionary entries, working-group updates, federation news, and what is changing in research-administration standards. Sent once per month from [email protected].

Standards CASRAI builds on, contributes to, and federates with