Origin story
How CRediT came to exist
A 1997 idea, a 2012 workshop, a 2014 paper, eight years of CASRAI stewardship, and a 2022 ANSI/NISO standard.
1997 — the prehistory
The intellectual case for replacing author lists with structured contribution statements predates CRediT by more than a decade. In 1997 Drummond Rennie, Veronica Yank, and Linda Emanuel published an editorial in JAMA arguing the byline of a research paper was a fiction. Nature, BMJ, and the Lancet took up the argument across the following years; by the early 2000s several major medical journals were asking authors to file freeform contribution statements, but with no controlled vocabulary and no machine-readable format.
May 2012 — the Harvard / Wellcome workshop
The pivotal event was an International Workshop on Contributorship and Scholarly Attribution convened at Harvard University in May 2012, jointly organised by the Wellcome Trust and Harvard, at the initiative of the Wellcome Trust. Biomedical researchers, ICMJE journal editors, funders, and information-standards specialists agreed: there was consensus that contribution should be recorded; there was no consensus on how; the workshop's brief was to produce a working pilot.
The workshop report (Harvard, 18 September 2012) is the founding document of the CRediT effort.
2013–2014 — the pilot
A working group formed: Liz Allen (then Wellcome Trust, later F1000), Amy Brand (then Digital Science, later MIT Press), Jo Scott, Micah Altman (MIT), and Marjorie Hlava (Access Innovations / NISO). The group iterated the taxonomy, piloted it with biomedical journal editors and the ICMJE, and converged on the 14-role list that survives essentially unchanged today.
April 2014 — the Nature paper
The taxonomy was introduced to the scholarly community in:
Allen, L., Brand, A., Scott, J., Altman, M., & Hlava, M. (2014). Publishing: Credit where credit is due. Nature, 508, 312–313. https://doi.org/10.1038/508312a
This is the canonical citation for the taxonomy.
2014 — CASRAI takes stewardship
In 2014 CASRAI agreed to host CRediT and convene the ongoing working group. CASRAI provided governance, a public web home, working-group facilitation, and the diplomatic cover needed to convene publishers who would not otherwise have sat at the same table. That decision is why CRediT is now widely (and informally) attributed to CASRAI rather than to Harvard or the Wellcome Trust. Both attributions are correct: Harvard / Wellcome originated it; CASRAI made it survive.
2015–2017 — early adoption
By 2015 CRediT was in production use at several journals. PLOS and eLife were the first major adopters, mandating CRediT statements across their portfolios in 2017. Cell Press rolled out CRediT to its journal portfolio in the same window. National Academy of Sciences endorsement followed in 2018.
2020 — Wellcome / Sloan funding and the CASRAI wind-down
In 2020 the Wellcome Trust and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded fresh grant funding to accelerate CRediT adoption. This was also the year CASRAI announced it would wind down — but the joint stewardship arrangement that the CASRAI board negotiated (CRediT → NISO; Catalogue of Elements → euroCRIS; RDM Glossary → CODATA) meant CRediT moved smoothly to a more durable home.
February 2022 — ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022
ANSI approved the standard on 14 January 2022 and NISO published it on 8 February 2022. The substantive vocabulary did not change at the transition; the stewardship model, change-control process, and identifier namespace moved from casrai.org to NISO (mirrored at casrai.org/credit). See our standardisation page for the detail.
Who deserves credit for CRediT
The taxonomy was a collective effort over a decade. The most defensible "founders" naming — those on the record from the 2012 workshop through to today — are:
- Liz Allen (Wellcome Trust → F1000)
- Amy Brand (Digital Science → MIT Press)
- Micah Altman (MIT)
- Marjorie Hlava (Access Innovations)
- Jo Scott
The 2014 Nature paper lists them in that order.
