Members

Founding-member cohort

The 2026 revival is in its founding-member phase. We are recruiting institutions across the constituencies the original CASRAI consortium convened, with a deliberate emphasis on representation that reflects the global research system rather than a single region. Expressions of interest are welcome at membership@casrai.org. Founding-member commitments and recognition are described in the membership pack issued on enquiry.

Until the founding cohort is closed, we deliberately do not publish a partial members list — naming three or four early signatories would misrepresent the breadth we are building toward. The complete list will be published with the first annual report.

Who CASRAI is for

CASRAI sits in the middle of the research-information stack and exists to convene the institutions that produce, consume, transmit, and govern research metadata. Historically the consortium drew its members from five constituencies:

Research-performing organisations

Universities, colleges, and independent research institutes. Their interest is in the demand-side burden: every funder form, CV format, and publisher template their researchers have to fill in. Shared vocabulary is the cheapest fix. Members of the original consortium included institutions from the UK, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, and elsewhere, often participating through national chapters (CASRAI-UK, CASRAI-Canada). The history page covers the regional-network arrangements that worked and the ones that lapsed.

Teaching hospitals and clinical research organisations

Hospitals with substantive research programmes have a distinct profile: high publication volume, complex contributor attribution (clinical authors, statisticians, data managers, regulatory leads), and a regulatory environment that pushes them toward structured reporting. The ICMJE recommendations govern how this constituency thinks about authorship, and CRediT is the natural complement.

Research councils and funders

Public and philanthropic funders — UK Research and Innovation, the Wellcome Trust, the NIH, the European Commission, the Canadian Tri-Agency, the Australian Research Council, and the long tail of national and regional councils — are the upstream pressure point. When funders adopt shared vocabulary in their reporting requirements, every grantee institution follows. The 2020 Wellcome and Sloan grants documented on the funders page were the practical evidence of this leverage.

Scholarly publishers

Publishers operate the submission systems where CRediT contribution statements are first collected and where ICMJE-style authorship policy is enforced. Their interest in CASRAI sits in two places: making sure the vocabulary they implement in submission systems matches what funders and institutions will accept downstream, and feeding the roadmap (extensions for acknowledged contributors, peer-review credit, discipline-specific elaborations) from the evidence base their workflows generate. Both large commercial publishers and learned-society publishers have historically been members.

Infrastructure providers

The persistent-identifier and metadata-exchange infrastructure — ORCID, Crossref, DataCite, the ROR registry of research organisations — and the CRIS-system vendors (Pure, Symplectic Elements, Converis, VIVO and the open-source ecosystem) make up the technical layer that shared vocabulary actually flows through. Their participation is what turns standards into running systems.

Membership categories (indicative)

The 2026 membership model is being finalised in consultation with the editorial board. The indicative shape:

• Institutional member — research-performing organisations, teaching hospitals, research councils, publishers, and infrastructure providers. Voting rights at the annual general meeting, working-group participation, and standing on the editorial board after the founding cohort.
• Affiliate member — smaller organisations, consortia, and projects. Working-group participation; no voting rights.
• Sustaining contributor — vendors, consultancies, and other commercial parties whose interest in the standards is operational rather than as primary stakeholders. No working-group steering; recognition in the annual report.

The fee schedule is sized to the institution rather than uniform. The published fee schedule will accompany the founding-member announcement.

What members get

The Dictionary is and remains CC-BY 4.0 — members do not get privileged access to the vocabulary. What members get is participation in the editorial process: voting at the AGM, eligibility for the editorial board, standing in working groups, and a route to bring institutional concerns into the standards roadmap. Members are also acknowledged in the annual report and in the dictionary changelog where they have contributed substantively. This is the standard non-profit standards-body pattern (compare NISO membership).

Becoming a member

Enquiries from prospective founding members are welcome at membership@casrai.org. The editorial board reviews founding-member applications on a rolling basis and confirms membership status with the next quarterly board meeting. Onboarding covers working-group placement, AGM scheduling, and the institution's named contacts for the operations team.