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.
The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) is a star-rating quality-assessment tool used to appraise non-randomized studies -- cohort studies and case-control studies -- for inclusion in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Developed by Wells, Shea, O'Connell, Peterson, Welch, Losos and Tugwell through a University of Newcastle (Australia) / University of Ottawa (Canada) collaboration and maintained by the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, it scores studies across three domains -- Selection (max 4 stars), Comparability (max 2 stars), and Outcome/Exposure (max 3 stars) -- for a maximum of 9 stars. It is commonly paired with the MOOSE reporting guideline for meta-analyses of observational studies, and is distinct from ROBINS-I (Cochrane's preferred non-randomized-study risk-of-bias tool) and GRADE (which rates the overall evidence base rather than individual studies).
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) is a UK centre of expertise in research data management and digital curation, established in 2005 by a consortium led by the University of Edinburgh following a competitive bid process run by Jisc. It is best known for DMPonline, the UK's most widely used data management planning tool, but also provides training, guidance, consultancy, and the widely-cited Curation Lifecycle Model. Jisc funding ended in 2016; the DCC's ongoing core partnership is with the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow.
STTR (Small Business Technology Transfer) is a U.S. federal award program created by the Small Business Technology Transfer Act of 1992 (Public Law 102-564) that funds early-stage small-business R&D on the condition that the small business formally partners with a U.S. nonprofit research institution, with the small business performing at least 40% of the work and the research institution at least 30%. Like the earlier SBIR program it is modeled on, STTR funding is non-dilutive (no equity taken, no government IP ownership) and runs through the same three-phase structure, but unlike SBIR the Principal Investigator may be employed by either the small business or the partnering research institution rather than being required to work primarily for the small business.
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) is a journal-level citation metric calculated from Scopus data by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University -- not by Elsevier, despite appearing alongside Elsevier's own CiteScore on Scopus source pages. SNIP measures citations received in a given year to a journal's publications from the preceding three years, divided by the number of those publications, then normalizes that ratio by the citation potential of the journal's subject field, correcting for the fact that citation practices (typical reference-list length, citation density) vary sharply across disciplines.
The Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR) is China's national clinical trial registry, established in 2005 by the Chinese Cochrane Centre/Chinese Evidence-Based Medicine Centre team at West China Hospital, Sichuan University, and accepted in 2007 as the fourth WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) Primary Registry, with the Ministry of Health of China (now the National Health Commission) designating it as China's official representative to that network. ChiCTR accepts registration of both interventional and observational studies, from China and internationally, and publishes the full WHO Trial Registration Data Set for each registered study.
The Clinical Trials Registry - India (CTRI) is India's national clinical trial registry, established on July 20, 2007 and operated by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), currently hosted at ICMR's National Institute for Research in Digital Health and Data Science (formerly NIMS), and recognized as a WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) primary registry. Registration is mandatory and must occur prospectively, before enrollment of the first participant; the requirement, initially a 2009 order from India's Drugs Controller General, was subsequently placed on a statutory footing by the New Drugs and Clinical Trials Rules, 2019.
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
