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.
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 backorder is a temporary vendor status: the item remains in the vendor's active catalog and a specific shipment or lot is delayed, with an expected restock date (an ETA) that the buyer can plan a reorder timeline around. A discontinued status is permanent: the vendor has stopped producing or carrying the item entirely, there is no restock date because none is coming, and the correct response is to identify and validate a substitute item rather than wait. A status only counts as "discontinued" for planning purposes once the vendor confirms it directly (or the item is formally removed from the vendor's catalog) — an unexplained delay or an ambiguous "unavailable" label is neither one until confirmed.
A stocking quantity is a par level (rather than an arbitrary reorder habit) when it is calculated as (Average daily usage x Lead time in days) + Safety stock, and is used as the target quantity a stocking location -- a supply cart, a lab bench, a central stores shelf -- is restocked up to at each periodic review, so that the reorder amount at any count is simply par level minus on-hand quantity.
A group purchasing organization (GPO) is an entity that aggregates the purchasing volume of multiple, separately owned member facilities and uses that combined volume to negotiate supply and equipment contracts with vendors on members' behalf. What makes something a GPO rather than a related arrangement: (1) it aggregates volume across multiple independent legal entities, not just departments within one organization; (2) it negotiates and publishes vendor contracts members can buy against directly, without members running their own competitive solicitation for that item; and (3) it is typically funded by an administrative fee the awarded vendor pays the GPO on completed sales, not by membership dues charged to the facility. Contracts are commonly structured in pricing tiers tied to how much of a facility's category spend it commits to routing through the awarded vendor, and facilities remain free to buy specific items off-contract when no suitable GPO contract exists or a documented exception applies.
The smallest quantity of a single SKU a supplier will accept in one order, set by the supplier as a mandatory floor for the sale to happen at all -- distinct from a price-break quantity, which is an optional volume tier for a lower per-unit price.
Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) is a supply-chain arrangement in which the vendor, not the purchasing facility, monitors on-hand stock levels for a defined set of items and decides when and how much to reorder, replenishing against par levels (or min/max thresholds) the two parties agreed to in advance. What makes an arrangement VMI specifically is that the reorder decision itself sits with the vendor, exercised against pre-agreed rules and some visibility into actual consumption — not merely that the vendor delivers supplies, and not necessarily that the vendor owns the stock until it's used (that's a separate, sometimes-combined arrangement called consignment inventory). The facility placing every order itself, tracking its own shelves and submitting its own purchase orders item by item, is the traditional alternative VMI replaces for the items it covers.
Total cost of ownership (TCO) in medical equipment purchasing is the sum of every cost a unit generates over a defined ownership horizon -- typically its expected useful life -- minus any residual or resale value at the end of that horizon, evaluated on the same basis as a competing option. A cost belongs in the calculation if it is a direct consequence of owning and operating that specific unit: purchase price, installation, service/maintenance contracts, consumables and reagents, calibration and compliance testing, staff training, downtime, financing costs, and disposal or decommissioning. Comparing two options on purchase price alone, or over mismatched time horizons, is not a TCO comparison even if it is labeled one.
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 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
Reps. John Moolenaar and Ben Cline asked Acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas on Aug. 21, 2026 to reject Chinese clinical data absent a recent FDA site audit, after three undisclosed trial deaths surfaced. What sponsors and IRBs relying on China-sourced data should expect next.
Read post →
Editorial
The Australian Research Council published a draft FAIR Data Policy on Aug. 11, 2026 for sector feedback, embedding Findable and Accessible requirements into future National Competitive Grants Program schemes. Feedback closes Sept. 16, 2026 — what ARC-funded institutions should check now.
Read post →
Editorial
Elsevier told Games and Economic Behavior’s editor-in-chief his six-year term would end in December; all six editors resigned within weeks, and 58 of 62 advisory editors followed by Aug. 19, 2026. What the collapse of a discipline-leading journal’s editorial board means for authors and institutions.
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
