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 →Featured this release
A taste of what's inside v2026.1 — pull any entry to see its definition, picklists, related terms, and citation form.
PHS 2590 is the Non-Competing Continuation Progress Report, a Public Health Service-wide, OMB-approved form (face page, detailed budget for the next period, budget justification, progress-report summary, personnel and inclusion-enrollment reporting) historically filed annually on an already-funded, non-competing award. At NIH, the RPPR (Research Performance Progress Report) now replaces it for all Type 5 non-competing continuation annual progress reports, all project closeouts, and all interim reports; NIH restricts current PHS 2590 use to Type 4 administrative extensions, such as an SBIR/STTR Fast-Track Phase II application. The pre-RPPR SNAP/non-SNAP fork on the 2590 (whether a detailed budget page was required) carried over directly into the RPPR's own Section H budget requirement and due-date calculation. The form now in circulation is the 08/2025 revision, with a current OMB expiration date of 11/30/2027 and the previously required Trainee Diversity Report removed.
The figure required by the CONSORT statement (2025 item 22a) that accounts for every participant in a randomised trial across four stages — enrolment, allocation to intervention, follow-up, and data analysis — reporting a count in each box and, under item 22b, a stated reason for every loss or exclusion occurring after randomisation.
An international, open-science consortium, founded in 2016 and convened by the Broad Institute, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and Wellcome, that aims to create comprehensive reference maps of every cell type in the human body using single-cell and spatial genomics. The HCA is a distributed research collaboration organized into national/regional networks and topic-specific Biological Networks (not a repository, funder, or formal legal entity), coordinated by an Organizing Committee and Working Groups, publishing data and analysis tools through the HCA Data Portal for free public reuse under its own network-level standards.
Reverse causality (also called reverse causation) is the error of assuming a relationship between two variables, X and Y, runs from X to Y when the true causal arrow runs the opposite way -- from Y to X -- or, in the general case, runs both ways at once as a feedback loop. It requires no third variable: the mistake is not that some lurking factor is driving both X and Y (that is confounding), it is that the direction assigned to a real relationship between X and Y is simply backwards. Observing that X and Y are correlated, or even that X was measured before Y, does not establish that X causes Y -- it is equally consistent with Y's own prior trajectory having produced X, which is common whenever both variables are stable traits or slow-moving processes capable of influencing each other over time.
A non-profit, independent clinical-trial data-sharing platform that hosts a searchable catalogue of individual participant-level data (IPD) from completed clinical trials and mediates researcher access to it through a structured, multi-stage request-and-review process rather than open download. Approved researchers analyze the data inside a browser-based secure research environment; the underlying files are never downloaded to the researcher's own machine. Vivli grew out of a project at the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials (MRCT) Center of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard, and launched publicly in July 2018.
ClinPGx (the renamed, relaunched successor to PharmGKB, the Pharmacogenomics Knowledgebase) is the NIH-funded, Stanford-hosted resource that curates the evidence linking specific genetic variants to drug response -- clinical annotations, dosing guidelines, and drug-label pharmacogenomic annotations -- and now brings PharmGKB's original knowledgebase together with CPIC's dosing guidelines and PharmCAT's genotype-to-phenotype annotation tool under one platform at clinpgx.org (pharmgkb.org now redirects there). What makes a gene-drug relationship a PharmGKB/ClinPGx entry specifically is that the resource's own curation team has reviewed the evidence and published a structured clinical annotation with an assigned level of evidence under a stable, citable identifier -- not merely that a primary study reported the association.
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 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
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 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
