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
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.
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
1,986 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
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 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
Roles, the pre-award to closeout lifecycle, the CRA/CPRA/CFRA credentials, and the rules research offices work under.
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.
Protocols and SOPs, equipment operation, and chemical, biological and physical hazard safety.
Study design, sampling and power, quantitative and qualitative analysis, and survey research.
Reference managers, statistical and qualitative software, survey platforms, and lab informatics.
GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, ISO 17025 and CLIA accreditation, biosafety, and chemical hygiene.
Selecting, calibrating and maintaining pipettes, autoclaves, balances, centrifuges and more.
HAI surveillance, sentinel event review, stewardship, and reprocessing standards.
Frontier AI safety frameworks, regulation, third-party evaluation, and incident governance.
Browse by discipline
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
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.
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 →A CASRAI product
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.
Every answer, sourced
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
A taste of what's inside v2026.1 — pull any entry to see its definition, picklists, related terms, and citation form.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) is a bimonthly peer-reviewed journal published by the IEEE Computer Society focusing on architectural, software, and protocol-level security and fault tolerance. In academic research assessment, its citation metrics measure the frequency with which recent articles are cited across scientific literature, reflecting publication reach in computer systems dependability.
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) covering information security, digital forensics, biometrics, cryptography, and multimedia surveillance architectures.
Computers & Security (ISSN 0167-4048, E-ISSN 1872-6208) is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Elsevier covering information assurance and cybersecurity. Journal metrics include an OpenAlex-verified 2-year mean citedness of 11.90 and an h-index of 182 across 9,951 cataloged works. In alignment with DORA and CoARA guidance, journal-level citation metrics should not be used as evaluative proxies for individual article quality or scientific contribution.
ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS) is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Association for Computing Machinery that covers research in information security, cryptography, systems privacy, and data protection. Formerly titled ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), the venue serves computer science and cybersecurity researchers reporting novel defensive architectures, attack analysis, and formal verification methods.
Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing (MBEC) is an international peer-reviewed journal covering biomedical engineering, medical computing, and clinical instrumentation. Founded in 1963, it is the official journal of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE) and published monthly by Springer Nature.
The Frontiers in Microbiology impact factor is the Journal Impact Factor associated with that journal: citations in a given JCR year to items published in the previous two years, divided by the citable items from those two years. The journal page showed 5.8 on 8 November 2026 without a data-year label.
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 CASRAI CRediT reference site — 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
On 2 November 2026 a federal judge granted Harvard summary judgment on Francesca Gino’s claims, including contract and sex discrimination. Harvard’s defamation counterclaim remains pending.
Read post →
Editorial
Four papers on maternal diabetes and neural tube formation were retracted after a University of Maryland, Baltimore investigation; notices cite image duplication and missing original data.
Read post →
Editorial
On 6 November 2026 a Queen Mary University of London-led team published a Nature Machine Intelligence Perspective proposing ecological foundation models, with caveats on data gaps and bias.
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 CASRAI Bulletin
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
Programmes of The Health Initiative
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.
Physician-led video care, in English or Spanish
General practice physician · PR licence 24027
CASRAI’s parent 501(c)(3) nonprofit
