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.
Research-world adoption
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.
Cambridge
UK
View CASRAI reference
Columbia
US
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
Crossref
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
714 entries across 20 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 moreFlagship 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 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.
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.
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).
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.
Research funding policies and award practices that explicitly incorporate climate and environmental sustainability considerations into eligibility, proposal review, and reporting.
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.
Twenty domains · Five tracks
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.
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.
Federation, not duplication
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
DORA’s 2023-2026 strategic plan concludes in 2026. Here is what it achieved on responsible research assessment, and what UK institutions should do next.
Read post →
Editorial
Horizon Europe now applies immediate open access and CC licensing to funded monographs and edited volumes, closing the long-form embargo gap.
Read post →
Editorial
A practical guide to narrative CV formats like UKRI’s Résumé for Research and Innovation, with adaptable templates aligned to DORA and CoARA principles.
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, 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.
Monthly · No spam · CC-BY 4.0
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