Shared vocabularies for research administration.
CASRAI is a community-stewarded standards organisation, founded in 2006, that develops open vocabularies for research administration. Its flagship output is the CASRAI Dictionary (1,986 terms across 29 domains), alongside reference material on the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT, ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022), which NISO has stewarded since CASRAI’s 2020 transfer. 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
Referenced across the research world
The CRediT taxonomy — now ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, stewarded by NISO — 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.
- Dictionary entries
- 1,986
- 29 domains
- Thematic domains
- 29
- 6 tracks
- CRediT roles
- 14
- NISO Z39.104
- Founded
- 2006
- Revived 2026
- 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
1,986 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
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
Learn moreLayer 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
Learn moreBrowse by research cluster
16 topical clusters
Every guide, comparison, and definition on the site belongs to one of 16 clusters spanning research administration, research practice and laboratory work. Each cluster pillar is the hub for its sub-topics and worked guidance.
Start here · Overview
Research Administration
Roles, the pre-award to closeout lifecycle, the CRA/CPRA/CFRA credentials, and the rules research offices work under.
CRediT & Authorship Attribution
Contributor roles, authorship criteria and order, integrity and disputes.
Research Data Management
DMPs, repositories, FAIR data, metadata standards, and reproducibility.
Persistent Identifiers & CRIS
ORCID, DOI, ROR, research-information systems, and bibliometrics.
Research Integrity & Compliance
Misconduct oversight, research security, export control, and ethics.
Scholarly Publishing
Open access, transformative agreements, research assessment, and metadata.
Scholarly Writing
Manuscript conventions, proposal craft, and reviewer-response writing.
Grants Management & Funding
The funding lifecycle, agencies and foundations, and award compliance.
Technology Transfer & Innovation
University IP, licensing mechanics, spinouts, and startup formation.
Clinical Research Administration
Trial operations, regulatory pathways, and billing compliance.
Laboratory Operations & Safety
Protocols and SOPs, equipment operation, and chemical, biological and physical hazard safety.
Research Methods & Statistics
Study design, sampling and power, quantitative and qualitative analysis, and survey research.
Research Tools & Software
Reference managers, statistical and qualitative software, survey platforms, and lab informatics.
Laboratory Compliance & Quality
GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, ISO 17025 and CLIA accreditation, biosafety, and chemical hygiene.
Laboratory Equipment & Instruments
Selecting, calibrating and maintaining pipettes, autoclaves, balances, centrifuges and more.
Patient Safety & Infection Prevention
HAI surveillance, sentinel event review, stewardship, and reprocessing standards.
Frontier AI Safety & Governance
Frontier AI safety frameworks, regulation, third-party evaluation, and incident governance.
Browse by discipline
Disciplines & industries
The same guides, indexed by the fields they are relevant to — from biomedical research and chemistry to engineering, the social sciences and industry R&D.
NISO standard · CASRAI reference
The Contributor Roles Taxonomy
Fourteen standardised roles for attributing contributions to scholarly research outputs. Originated 2012; stewarded by CASRAI from 2014 until its 2020 transfer to NISO; 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
Beyond scholarly authorship
NIKOLAI — the same discipline, for frontier AI safety
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.
- Actors, models and scope
- Threat models and risk framing
- Thresholds and checkpoints
- Claims and argument
- Evidence and evaluations
- Mitigations and security
- Incidents
- Transparency and review
- Commitments and governance
- Assurance roles
Ten tracks, one dictionary
- Tracks
- 10
- Elements
- 64
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 CASRAI — an AI assistant for research administration
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.
- 2 CFR 200 (Uniform Guidance) — Cost allowability, subawards, single-audit rules — OMB’s amendments publish in the Federal Register, and we check for them every day.
- Federal Register notices — The specific notice behind a requirement, not just a summary of it.
- Funder-specific rules — NIH, NSF and the other funder policies CASRAI’s guides already cover.
Every answer, sourced
- Free questions
- 2
- Per month
- $29
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
Selected dictionary entries
A taste of what's inside v2026.1 — pull any entry to see its definition, picklists, related terms, and citation form.
29 domains · 6 tracks
The full domain map
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
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
Built to interoperate, not duplicate
Our work, alongside other standards bodies
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
Three tools, all browser-native
No signup. No backend dependency. Everything runs locally in your browser.
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 moreFor Institutions
CRIS, compliance, library practice
Plug the dictionary into your CRIS. Train your research office. Templates for adoption policies.
Learn moreFor Publishers
Submission, JATS, scorecard
Adopt CRediT in your submission system. JATS implementation guide. Public implementation scorecard.
Learn moreImplement
GraphQL, REST, MCP, JATS
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
Claim your verified author identity
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
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.
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.
LAC Health applies the CRediT taxonomy to its clinical reference content
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
From the editorial layer
Working-group reports, federation updates, and commentary on what's changing in research-administration standards.
State of CRediT adoption — 2026
Four years after ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, the adoption picture is a study in unevenness — almost universal policy uptake, partial structured capture, patchy pipeline propagation. The first annual review from the revived CASRAI: who's implementing what, where the structured-vs-narrative gap is widest, and what the data suggests should change.
Read the annual report
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.
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 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
The CASRAI Bulletin
A six-minute editorial digest of what actually changed in research-administration standards — and what is about to.
- Public-comment windows on release candidates — hard deadlines, easy to miss anywhere else.
- The dictionary changelog: new, revised, deprecated and renamed entries, each with a permalink.
- One perspective essay from a working-group chair, plus what NISO, euroCRIS and CODATA published.
Standards CASRAI builds on, contributes to, and federates with
Programmes of The Health Initiative
One nonprofit, two programmes
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.
- The Health Initiative’s telehealth service in Puerto Rico
Physician-led video care, in English or Spanish
- Dr. Diana Nieves Castro, MD
General practice physician · PR licence 24027
- About The Health Initiative
CASRAI’s parent 501(c)(3) nonprofit