About CASRAI

CASRAI develops open standards for research administration information — the vocabularies, picklists, object templates, and crosswalks that researchers, institutions, funders, and publishers all rely on when they exchange data about people, outputs, projects, and grants. The animating problem is the same one the organisation was founded to solve in 2006: researchers and the administrators around them spend enormous effort re-keying the same information into incompatible systems, and the cost of that fragmentation falls disproportionately on the people doing the actual work.

Our outputs are designed to reduce that administrative burden by making it possible to report once and reuse downstream. CRediT replaces the opaque authorship byline with fourteen machine-readable contributor roles. The CASRAI Dictionary defines a shared vocabulary for the entities of research administration — awards, outputs, datasets, affiliations, identifiers — so that when a funder, a publisher, and an institution describe the same thing they describe it the same way. Crosswalks bind those terms to the adjacent standards stewarded by DataCite, Crossref, ORCID, MARC 21, and Schema.org.

Every CASRAI output is published under CC-BY 4.0 at zero cost to end-users, and every standard is the product of a federated stewardship model: we work with NISO, euroCRIS, CODATA, RDA, ARDC, and the persistent-identifier infrastructure providers rather than competing with them. Federation, not displacement, is the design principle and the reason the work scales.

CASRAI publishes every standard, dictionary entry, crosswalk, and reference document under CC-BY 4.0. There are no paywalls, no logins, no gated PDFs, and no licensing tiers — the same content is available to a multinational publisher, a one-person research group, and an undergraduate auditor. Attribution is the only requirement, and every URL on this site is a stable identifier we commit to maintaining.

Substantive decisions are made by the twenty working groups, one per dictionary domain. Each group is community-run, with a chair, an open membership roster, and a recurring meeting cadence. Term proposals, definition refinements, and crosswalk mappings progress by working-group consensus; the editorial board is consulted only when a group cannot reach agreement, and even then the board's role is procedural rather than substantive.

The CASRAI positioning is federation, not displacement. Where another standards body has primary stewardship of a vocabulary — NISO for CRediT, euroCRIS for the Catalogue of Elements, CODATA for the RDM Terminology, DataCite for the data-citation schema — CASRAI cross-walks rather than duplicates. New terms enter the Dictionary through open peer review, with public comment periods and a published rationale on every accepted entry.