Annual report

Status: inaugural report in preparation

The 2026 CASRAI revival publishes its inaugural annual report at the close of the fiscal year, targeted for December 2026. As of v2026.1 (released 17 May 2026), the operating period has been three weeks and there is not yet a year of activity to report on. This placeholder page describes what the annual report will contain and the transparency conventions it will follow, so that members, funders, and federation partners can see the reporting expectation in advance. The funders page describes the funding model the report will account against; the editorial board page describes the governance structure the report will document.

Structure of the report

The report follows the transparency conventions used by comparable standards bodies and research-philanthropy grantees. Each year's report has five sections:

1. Activity

A narrative summary of the year's editorial and convening work. For 2026 this will include: the v2026.1 launch on 17 May; the v2026.2 release planned for September 2026; working-group activity in the 20 dictionary domains; federation liaison with NISO, euroCRIS, CODATA, ORCID, Crossref, DataCite, and the Research Data Alliance; engagement with evaluation-reform coalitions ( DORA, COARA); and any joint statements issued with federation partners. Activity is described concretely — counts of terms added, deprecated, or revised; working-group meetings convened; consultations responded to — not in aspirational language.

2. Finances

A full accounting of the year's income and expenditure, with named funders and material in-kind contributions disclosed. Reporting categories follow the structure used by signatories of thetransparency-charity convention: income by source, expenditure by function (editorial, operations, convening, infrastructure), unrestricted vs restricted funds, and reserves position. The financial summary is signed off by the editorial board at the year-end board meeting and made available alongside the report.

3. Governance

The state of the editorial board during the reporting year: members joined, members departed, terms expiring, conflict-of-interest declarations on file, board meetings convened (notes published on this site), and any extraordinary decisions taken outside the regular cadence. New members of the operations team are introduced. Federation-partner liaison contacts are listed.

4. Decisions

Substantive editorial decisions made during the year — particularly any contested term proposals that the board adjudicated, formal deprecations (logged on the deprecations page), revisions to the editorial policy, and any joint statements signed with federation partners. The decisions section is the record researchers and implementers can reference when explaining why a vocabulary changed.

5. Metrics

Quantitative health indicators for the standards work: total terms in the dictionary; terms added, revised, and deprecated in the year; number of formal contributors named in release changelogs; dictionary downloads and API call volumes (where measurable without compromising user privacy); CRediT implementation-audit findings (per the roadmap thrust on implementation depth); and federation-coordination metrics (joint statements, cross-stewardship referrals, working-group cross-membership).

Publication conventions

The annual report is published as:

• An HTML version on this site under /about/annual-report/<year>
• A downloadable PDF mirror with the same content
• Machine-readable JSON for the metrics section, suitable for integration into evaluation dashboards (CRediT implementation audit results, for example)
• A short news post in the news section with the executive summary

The report is licensed CC-BY 4.0, the same licence as the Dictionary itself, and the underlying data is published in re-usable form. We follow the convention that transparency reporting should be itself reusable, not a one-off PDF artefact.

Cadence and historical reports

CASRAI's fiscal year aligns with the calendar year, and the annual report is published in February following the close of the fiscal year (allowing time for end-of-year accounting and editorial-board sign-off). The dictionary release cadence (twice yearly, March and September) and the report cadence are intentionally offset, so the report can account against a complete cycle of work. Past reports — when there are past reports — will be linked here.

The inaugural 2026 report covers the period from the v2026.1 launch (17 May 2026) through 31 December 2026, with the publication date targeted at end of fiscal year (December 2026) for the abbreviated period and February 2027 for the full-year accounting follow-up.

Continuity with the 2006–2020 record

The original CASRAI consortium published annual reports through its operational period. Those historic reports are not republished here — they remain in the Internet Archive capture of the legacy casrai.org site and are referenced where relevant on the history page. The 2026 report begins a new reporting series rather than continuing the historic numbering, in keeping with the honest continuity framing the revival uses elsewhere.

Enquiries

Funders, members, and journalists with questions about the reporting structure or specific figures can write to [email protected]. Press enquiries about the annual report should go to [email protected] — see the press kit for quotable summary statements.