Funders

Why funding shape matters

The original CASRAI consortium (2006–2020) was funded primarily by member dues. That funding model works in steady state, but it is vulnerable to two failure modes: revenue compression in any single year is felt immediately by the secretariat (volunteer working groups depend on paid coordination), and the membership skews toward institutions that already see the burden-reduction value of shared vocabulary — which is to say it underweights the upstream funders whose adoption is the actual leverage point. Both failure modes contributed to the 2020 wind-down. The history page covers the wind-down decision in detail. The 2026 revival treats this as a structural lesson, not an accident.

2020 — the philanthropic acceleration of CRediT

Two grants in 2020 were decisive in moving the Contributor Roles Taxonomy from a community-stewarded vocabulary into a formal international standard:

• The Wellcome Trust funded a strand of work on CRediT adoption among publishers and the evidence base for downstream use in evaluation. The Wellcome funding was instrumental in moving CRediT past the publisher-implementation threshold. See the Wellcome Trust grant portfolio for research-information work in this period.
• The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded the parallel strand on standardisation and identifier interoperability — the work that made the ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 trajectory possible by funding the convening, public consultation, and editorial work that ANSI accreditation requires. The Sloan Foundation's Digital Technology programme remains one of the most consistent philanthropic funders of scholarly- communications infrastructure.

Both grants were administered through partner organisations during the stewardship handover. The fact that dedicated philanthropic funding was secured before the CASRAI consortium wound down is the reason the asset handover to NISO, euroCRIS, and CODATA proceeded as smoothly as it did. See the NISO press release on the joint stewardship statement for the period record.

Historic member dues

Through 2006–2020 the consortium ran on member dues from research-performing institutions, teaching hospitals, research councils, scholarly publishers, and infrastructure providers, sized to institution type and capacity. The fee schedule is not republished here — the historic version is not directly applicable to the 2026 revival's membership shape, which is described on the members page. Members from the original consortium era are acknowledged for their multi-year support; the substantive output their dues funded — the Dictionary, the Catalogue of Elements, CRediT, the IRiDiuM glossary — remains in active use under the federation stewards.

In-kind contributions from federation partners

Since the 2020 handover, the substantive standards work has been funded in-kind by the federation stewards. NISO has carried the cost of the CRediT Standing Committee, the ANSI accreditation process, and the hosting at casrai.org/credit; euroCRIS has carried the cost of maintaining the Catalogue of Elements alongside CERIF; CODATA has carried the cost of the RDM Terminology working group. The 2026 CASRAI does not duplicate any of this work and therefore does not need to fund it.

2026 — exploring sustainable models

The 2026 revival is being built lean by design — the operations team is intentionally small — but it does carry real costs (editorial coordination, dictionary publication infrastructure, working-group convening, federation liaison). The funding model being explored combines three sources:

1. Founding-member contributions. Institutional members of the founding cohort underwrite operational baseline. Pricing is sized to institution type; the schedule will be published with the founding cohort.
2. Philanthropic grants for delimited workstreams. Following the 2020 model, time-bounded grants from research-philanthropy funders are the appropriate instrument for specific roadmap items (the implementation-audit framework described in the roadmap, vocabulary work in under-served domains, translation programmes). Open conversations are welcome at funders@casrai.org.
3. In-kind contribution from federation partners on coordination work where the value accrues to the whole federation rather than to CASRAI alone.

The model is deliberately conservative. The cautionary lesson of 2020 is that a standards body's funding shape should match the cost shape of its work, and that revenue concentration is a structural risk. We will publish the funding mix in the inaugural annual report.

Transparency commitments

CASRAI publishes its funding sources in the annual report. The reporting follows transparency-organisation conventions used by comparable standards bodies and signatories of the DORA coalition: named funders, grant titles, grant periods, amounts in the relevant currency, and a brief description of the funded work. We also disclose material in-kind contributions from federation partners. Conflict-of-interest policy at the editorial board covers funder-driven recusal where applicable.