Federation
Partners
CASRAI federates with the standards bodies, identifier registries, and policy coalitions that steward the parts of the research-information stack we do not. This page maps the relationships.
Federation, not duplication
The 2026 CASRAI is deliberately built on top of pre-existing stewardship. Where another body stewards a vocabulary, an identifier scheme, or a policy framework, we federate rather than parallel-publish. That posture is a direct response to the 2020 wind-down: the original CASRAI consortium dissolved partly because the convening overhead outran sustainable revenue, and the lesson is to do less duplication and more pointing. The history page covers the stewardship handover in detail.
Federation, in practice, means three things: sameAs pointers from Dictionary entries to the canonical URIs at the steward; release coordination so the vocabularies don't drift; and editorial-board liaison so federation partners see proposed dictionary changes that touch their assets before publication.
Core federation partners
Eight organisations form the core federation. Each has a dedicated page describing the relationship in detail.
NISO — the National Information Standards Organization
NISO stewards the Contributor Roles Taxonomy as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. The NISO CRediT Standing Committee maintains the standard, runs the implementation-feedback loop with publishers and identifier registries, and develops the v2 roadmap for extensions to acknowledged contributors and peer-review credit. See federation: NISO.
euroCRIS — European Organisation for International Research Information
euroCRIS stewards theCatalogue of Elements (the semantically described inventory of data elements used across funding applications, CVs, project management, compliance, reporting, RDM and scholarly communications) as an enrichment to the CERIF format. The catalogue is maintained at github.com/EuroCRIS/CASRAI-Dictionaries. See federation: euroCRIS.
CODATA — Committee on Data of the International Science Council
CODATA stewards theResearch Data Management Terminology (formerly the IRiDiuM RDM Glossary), maintained by a voluntary expert working group. CODATA is also the natural partner on the broader RDM vocabulary landscape, including FAIR data principles and the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI).
ORCID — Open Researcher and Contributor ID
ORCID runs the persistent identifier registry for researchers. CRediT roles surface in ORCID records via Crossref-mediated metadata, and the federation: ORCID page documents the message-flow and the editorial coordination for terms touching contributor identification.
Crossref
Crossref is the DOI registration agency for scholarly publications and the central metadata clearing house through which CRediT contributor statements propagate from publisher submission systems to downstream consumers (ORCID, indexers, evaluation systems). Crossref'scontributor-metadata schema embeds CRediT roles directly.
DataCite
DataCite is the DOI registration agency for research data and other non-article research outputs. Its contributorType vocabulary is the sibling to CRediT for datasets and software, and federation work is focused on keeping the two vocabularies legible to each other.
RDA — Research Data Alliance
RDA convenes the international working groups whose output most often becomes shared vocabulary in the RDM domain. CASRAI's working-group facilitator coordinates with RDA group chairs to avoid duplicate convening and to land RDA-produced terminology in the Dictionary with appropriate provenance.
ARDC — Australian Research Data Commons
ARDC operates Australia's national research-data infrastructure and is one of the most active implementers of FAIR-aligned vocabulary in production. ARDC's persistent-identifier and vocabulary services are reference implementations for several of the patterns CASRAI codifies.
Adjacent partners
Four further organisations sit adjacent to the federation: they don't steward CASRAI-asset vocabulary directly, but their policy frameworks define how that vocabulary is used in practice.
DORA — Declaration on Research Assessment
DORA is the international coalition pushing research-evaluation reform away from journal-level metrics and toward substantive contribution recognition. CRediT data is one of the structured inputs DORA signatories increasingly use; CASRAI's role is to make that data available, citable, and machine-readable.
COARA — Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment
COARA is the European counterpart coalition, with over 700 organisational signatories committing to evaluation reform. CASRAI publishes interpretation guidance for CRediT roles in evaluation contexts and tracks COARA working-group output that affects the standards roadmap.
ICMJE — International Committee of Medical Journal Editors
ICMJE sets the authorship criteria that govern biomedical publishing — the four-part authorship test, the distinction between authors and acknowledged contributors, the corresponding-author responsibilities. CRediT complements ICMJE rather than replacing it: ICMJE decides who is an author, CRediT records what each author and each acknowledged contributor did.
COPE — Committee on Publication Ethics
COPE sets editorial-ethics guidance for the scholarly publishing community. Contribution-related disputes (ghost authorship, gift authorship, contested CRediT statements) increasingly land in COPE flowcharts, and CASRAI participates in editorial consultations where vocabulary precision affects ethical adjudication.
How to engage as a partner
Federation partnerships are initiated through the editorial board, formalised in a joint statement (the same instrument used by the 2020 NISO/euroCRIS/CODATA handover), and operationalised by the operations team. Enquiries from prospective partner organisations are welcome at partnerships@casrai.org.
