Team

How CASRAI is staffed

The original CASRAI consortium (2006–2020) carried a paid secretariat alongside its volunteer working groups, and the gap between revenue and secretariat cost is the structural reason the consortium wound down in 2020. The 2026 revival takes that lesson seriously. The operating model is a deliberately small editorial team supporting a much larger volunteer community, with the bulk of substantive standards work continuing to live at the federation stewards: NISO for the Contributor Roles Taxonomy, euroCRIS for the Catalogue of Elements, and CODATA for the Research Data Management Terminology. See the history page for the long version.

Governance vs operations

Governance sits with the editorial board — a 5–7 person body that approves each dictionary release, adjudicates contested entries, signs joint statements with federation partners, and sets editorial standards. Operations is the day-to-day pipeline: editing, publishing, working-group facilitation, and external liaison. Confusing the two is one of the failure modes of small standards bodies, and we keep them separate by design.

Current operational roles

As of v2026.1, the operational team is intentionally minimal. Two primary roles are being recruited:

• Editorial coordinator. Owns the dictionary release pipeline: term intake, editorial review queue, schema validation, changelog assembly, and twice-yearly publication (March and September targets). Coordinates with the editorial board on adjudicated entries. Part-time, remote.
• Working-group facilitator. Convenes the cross-stakeholder working groups (publisher implementation, CRIS integration, evaluation-reform liaison) and keeps them on a publishable cadence. The same role acts as the first point of contact for new contributors via the get-involved pathway. Part-time, remote.

Both roles are open. Expressions of interest from senior research-administration practitioners, scholarly-communications editors, or RDM specialists are welcome at [email protected]. Compensation is honorarium-scale during the founding period; the funding model is described on the funders page.

Roles handled by the federation, not by us

We do not staff parallel standards work for things already stewarded elsewhere. In practice that means:

• CRediT standards maintenance — the NISO CRediT Standing Committee does this work. CASRAI participates as a community contributor, not as a co-maintainer.
• CERIF-aligned data-element work — the euroCRIS task groups do this work, and the Catalogue of Elements lives in their GitHub repository.
• Research-data-management terminology — the CODATA expert working group does this work.

Our value-add sits in the cross-stewardship layer: the CASRAI Dictionary that mirrors federation vocabulary with stable URIs andsameAs pointers, the editorial pipeline for net-new terms in domains no one else stewards, and the public reference function for "what does CASRAI do, and how do its assets fit together?"

Volunteers and contributors

The substantive editorial work happens in working groups and through the term-proposal pathway. Most contributors are practitioner volunteers — research administrators, librarians, CRIS implementers, scholarly publishers — donating expertise to the public-good vocabulary. We name contributors in release changelogs and in the dictionary changelog, and follow the DORA principle of crediting all contributions substantively, not just authorship.

Contact routing

• Editorial questions (term definitions, release content, dictionary scope): [email protected]
• Operations and partnerships (working-group hosting, federation, funder enquiries): [email protected]
• Press (interviews, brand assets, fact-checking): [email protected] — see the press kit
• General: [email protected]

We aim to acknowledge editorial-pathway enquiries within five working days. The editorial board meets quarterly; items requiring board adjudication are queued for the next scheduled meeting.