Partners

Interoperability, 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, CASRAI's own standards work points to that stewardship rather than parallel-publishing a competing version. 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.

In practice, that means sameAs pointers from Dictionary entries to the canonical URIs at the steward, so that a CASRAI dictionary entry and the steward's own record of the same concept resolve to the same thing rather than drifting into two competing definitions.

Standards CASRAI interoperates with

CASRAI's dictionary and standards work is built to interoperate with eight organisations' vocabularies, identifier schemes, and standards — several of which trace back to CASRAI assets transferred to them in the 2020 wind-down. Each has a dedicated page describing the technical relationship.

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 how CASRAI's dictionary work relates to 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 how CASRAI's dictionary work relates to 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's broader RDM vocabulary work, including FAIR data principles and the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), is closely aligned with CASRAI's own.

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 ORCID interoperability page documents the message-flow 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 CASRAI's dictionary 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. RDA-produced terminology that overlaps with CASRAI's scope is tracked and, where appropriate, reflected in the Dictionary with provenance back to the originating RDA working group.

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 policy frameworks

Four further organisations' policy frameworks sit adjacent to CASRAI's standards work: they don't steward CASRAI-asset vocabulary directly, but they 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 CRediT vocabulary precision is directly relevant to how such disputes get adjudicated.

Get in touch

Organisations whose standards, vocabularies, or policy frameworks overlap with CASRAI's dictionary work are welcome to get in touch at [email protected]. The 2020 NISO/euroCRIS/CODATA asset handover was formalised in a joint statement; any comparable future arrangement would go through the editorial board.