What does the CASRAI CRediT Connector plugin do?

It is a free WordPress plugin you install on your own self-hosted journal or blog. It lets each author record their CASRAI directory profile URL, ORCID iD, and default CRediT contributor roles, then automatically emits Schema.org JSON-LD on author archives and posts — a Person with sameAs links to the author's CASRAI profile and ORCID, and a BlogPosting whose CRediT contributions are expressed as a contributor array of Role objects (each carrying the human roleName and a url pointing at the canonical casrai.org/credit/roles vocabulary page) that reference the author by @id. It also offers an optional visible "CRediT-verified contributor on CASRAI" badge.

Is the plugin free, and what licence is it under?

Yes. CASRAI CRediT Connector is free and open-source, released under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2) — the same licence as WordPress itself. There is no fee, no licence key, and no account required to run the plugin. You do need a CASRAI Verified Contributor Directory profile to link to, which is what gives the handshake its second, verified endpoint.

What are the system requirements?

The plugin runs on any self-hosted WordPress 5.8 or newer with PHP 7.4 or newer. It has no external service dependencies, no database tables of its own, and no paid tier. It does not run on WordPress.com sites that disallow custom plugins; it is built for self-hosted (wordpress.org) installations where you control the plugin directory.

Do I need an ORCID iD and a CASRAI profile to use it?

The plugin works with whichever identifiers you provide, but it delivers its full value when both ends of the handshake exist. An ORCID iD (free from orcid.org) is the shared identity anchor; a CASRAI Verified Contributor Directory profile is the verified public hub that the plugin points your journal back to. With both in place, the same author entity is described consistently on your journal, on your CASRAI profile, and on ORCID — which is exactly what lets knowledge graphs resolve one verified person.

Will this guarantee more search traffic?

No, and any plugin that promises a particular search outcome is overselling. What this plugin does is publish accurate, verifiable structured data — Schema.org Person and BlogPosting JSON-LD with resolvable sameAs identifiers and canonical CRediT role URIs — that search engines and knowledge graphs consume when they resolve your verified author identity. That is a genuine, standards-based E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) signal. It is not a trick; it is making the truth about your authorship machine-readable. What search engines do with that accurate information is up to them.

Where does the CRediT role data come from?

From the canonical CRediT taxonomy — the 14 contributor roles standardised as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, each with a stable URI at casrai.org/credit/roles/ . The plugin references those URIs directly as Schema.org DefinedTerm identifiers, so the roles you assign on your journal resolve to the same definitions a publisher would use in JATS XML or a Crossref deposit.

Will the plugin slow down my site or add tracking?

No. The plugin emits a small block of inline JSON-LD in the page head and, optionally, a lightweight badge. It loads no external scripts on the front end, sets no cookies, and performs no tracking. It stores author identity in standard WordPress user meta and per-post roles in post meta — nothing leaves your server except the structured data search engines read from the page itself.

How is the badge verified, and what does rel="me" do?

The optional badge links from your journal to the author's CASRAI Verified Contributor Directory profile using rel="me", a standard relationship that asserts "this is the same person." Because the CASRAI profile links back to the journal and to ORCID, and all three share the same ORCID iD, the links form a reciprocal, verifiable identity chain rather than a one-way claim. CASRAI editors verify directory profiles before they go live, which is what makes the destination of the badge a trusted endpoint.

Tool · WordPress plugin

CRediT Connector for WordPress

A free plugin for your own self-hosted journal or blog that makes each post and author archive point back to your verified CASRAI profile and ORCID — with your CRediT contributor roles published as structured data search engines and knowledge graphs can read.

What this is

What this is — and why it matters

CASRAI CRediT Connector is a small, free WordPress plugin you install on a journal or blog you run yourself. Its single job is to make your site publish, in machine-readable form, the same truth your CASRAI profile already states: who wrote this, and what exactly did they contribute. It does that with Schema.org JSON-LD — the structured-data format search engines and knowledge graphs read — rather than relying on a crawler to guess from prose.

The core idea is a bidirectional identity handshake. Today your CASRAI directory profile already points outward: it links to your ORCID record and to your journal. What has been missing is the return link. This plugin makes your journal point back — to your CASRAI profile and to your ORCID — and it does so while tagging your contributions with canonical CRediT roles. Both ends now share the same ORCID iD and link to each other.

That reciprocity is what matters. When two independent sites both name the same author, carry the same ORCID iD, and link to one another, a search engine or knowledge graph can resolve them to one verified author entity rather than several loose mentions that might or might not be the same person. A single, well-described, cross-verified entity is a strong E-E-A-T signal — experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness — the qualities search engines weigh most heavily for expert content.

We are deliberately precise about the claim: the plugin publishes verifiable structured data that search engines and knowledge graphs consume. It does not, and cannot, promise any particular search outcome. What it guarantees is that the accurate, standards-based facts about your authorship are expressed in the exact vocabulary those systems are built to ingest to resolve your verified author identity.

The whole system

How it fits together — what each tool is for

Four pieces, each with one job. Together they form the closed loop that lets your authorship resolve to a single verified entity across the web.

The shared anchor · free

ORCID iD

The one persistent identifier that the same person carries everywhere. Free from orcid.org. It is the value that appears identically on your journal, your CASRAI profile, and your ORCID record — the pivot that lets a crawler conclude all three describe one author rather than three coincidentally similar names.

Get a free ORCID iD →

Your verified hub

CASRAI Verified Contributor Directory profile

Your public, editor-verified author entity on casrai.org. It points outward to your ORCID record and to your journal, and lists your CRediT roles. Because a CASRAI editor checks each profile before it goes live, it is the trusted endpoint the rest of the chain links to.

See the directory →Manage your profile →

Completes the handshake

This WordPress plugin

The piece that makes your journal point back. It adds your CASRAI profile and ORCID as sameAs links in your author and post markup, and tags your contributions with canonical CRediT role URIs — closing the loop so the link is reciprocal, not one-way.

Download the plugin →

The shared vocabulary

The CRediT taxonomy

The 14 standardised contributor roles (ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022), each with a stable URI at casrai.org/credit/roles. The plugin draws the roles you assign from this vocabulary, so "Writing — original draft" on your blog resolves to the same definition a journal would deposit to Crossref.

About CRediT →JSON-LD encoding →

How it works

How it works — in four steps

The plugin adds two places to enter data and then handles all the markup for you. Here is the full flow from installation to published structured data.

Install & activate. Upload the plugin .zip in your WordPress admin and activate it. It adds a CASRAI CRediT settings area and two new input surfaces — a per-user identity panel and a per-post roles box.
Set each author’s identity. In the author’s WordPress profile, enter their CASRAI directory profile URL, their ORCID iD, and their default CRediT roles (the roles they usually hold). This is the information the plugin will publish on that author’s archive page and on their posts.
Set per-post roles (optional). Most posts can inherit the author’s default roles, but the per-post “CRediT roles” box lets you override them for an individual article — useful when a particular piece reflects a different mix of contributions.
It emits JSON-LD & the badge. From then on, the plugin renders Schema.org Person JSON-LD on each author archive (with sameAs to the CASRAI profile and ORCID) and Schema.org BlogPosting JSON-LD on each post (with the author’s CRediT contributions as a contributor array of Role objects whose url points at canonical casrai.org/credit/roles/* pages). It can also show an optional visible “CRediT-verified contributor on CASRAI” badge, with a [casrai_credit_badge] shortcode for placing it anywhere.

The author-archive markup the plugin produces looks like this — a Person tied to one ORCID iD with a sameAs link to their CASRAI profile:

Author archive — Schema.org Person

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "Dr Jordan Avery",
  "url": "https://your-journal.example/author/jordan-avery/",
  "identifier": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097",
    "https://casrai.org/credit/authors/jordan-avery"
  ]
}

And on a post, the same author is defined once as a Person (by their ORCID @id), and their CRediT contributions are listed as Role objects in a contributor array — each carrying the human roleName and a url that resolves to the canonical CRediT role page, and referencing the author back by @id:

Post — BlogPosting with a contributor[] of CRediT Role objects

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BlogPosting",
  "headline": "A note on reproducibility in clinical audit",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "@id": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097",
    "name": "Dr Jordan Avery",
    "url": "https://casrai.org/credit/authors/jordan-avery",
    "sameAs": [
      "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097",
      "https://casrai.org/credit/authors/jordan-avery"
    ]
  },
  "contributor": [
    {
      "@type": "Role",
      "roleName": "Writing – original draft",
      "url": "https://casrai.org/credit/roles/writing-original-draft",
      "contributor": { "@id": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097" }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Role",
      "roleName": "Conceptualization",
      "url": "https://casrai.org/credit/roles/conceptualization",
      "contributor": { "@id": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097" }
    }
  ]
}

This is the same Role-wrapper encoding the CASRAI Verified Contributor Directory publishes and that publishers use on journal articles — so your blog speaks the identical structured-data dialect as the formal scholarly record.

Why it helps you

How it helps you as a credited, known author

The plugin is small, but the payoff is concrete. By turning your authorship into standards-based structured data and closing the link back to your verified identity, it gives you benefits that a plain byline cannot:

Verifiable authorship. Your contribution is no longer an unverifiable name on a page. It is a named person tied to an ORCID iD and an editor-verified CASRAI profile, with the specific CRediT roles you held — declared in the same vocabulary the formal scholarly record uses.
A single knowledge-graph entity. Because your journal, your CASRAI profile, and your ORCID all carry the same iD and link to one another, the systems that build knowledge graphs can fold them into one author entity rather than guessing across scattered mentions.
An E-E-A-T signal for YMYL content. For medical, scholarly, and other “your money or your life” (YMYL) subject matter — exactly where search engines scrutinise author credibility hardest — declared, machine-verifiable contributor roles are among the strongest expertise signals you can publish.
Cross-site identity. The same verified identity follows you wherever you write. A new blog, a co-authored journal article, and your CASRAI profile all resolve to the one author — your reputation compounds instead of fragmenting.
Discoverability. Structured authorship and resolvable role URIs make your work easier for discovery platforms, aggregators, and AI knowledge systems to attribute correctly to you — the difference between being found and being overlooked.

We frame this honestly: these are the benefits of publishing accurate, verifiable structured data that search engines and knowledge graphs consume. The plugin makes the truth about your authorship legible to machines so they can resolve your verified author identity — it does not promise any particular search outcome.

Installation

Install instructions

The plugin installs like any standard WordPress plugin .zip. The whole process takes a few minutes; the only prerequisite is a CASRAI directory profile URL and ORCID iD for each author you want to mark up.

Download the .zip. Grab casrai-credit-connector.zip from the download card above.
Upload it. In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the .zip, and click Install Now.
Activate. Click Activate once the upload finishes.
Open the settings. Go to Settings → CASRAI CRediT to confirm the global options (including whether the visible badge is enabled).
Fill in each author’s identity. For every contributor, open their WordPress user profile and enter their CASRAI profile URL, ORCID iD, and default CRediT roles.
Done. The plugin now emits Schema.org JSON-LD on author archives and posts automatically. Optionally drop [casrai_credit_badge] into a post, page, or widget to display the verified-contributor badge.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Common questions from members deciding whether and how to run the plugin on their own journal or blog.

What does the CASRAI CRediT Connector plugin do?: It is a free WordPress plugin you install on your own self-hosted journal or blog. It lets each author record their CASRAI directory profile URL, ORCID iD, and default CRediT contributor roles, then automatically emits Schema.org JSON-LD on author archives and posts — a Person with sameAs links to the author's CASRAI profile and ORCID, and a BlogPosting whose CRediT contributions are expressed as a contributor array of Role objects (each carrying the human roleName and a url pointing at the canonical casrai.org/credit/roles vocabulary page) that reference the author by @id. It also offers an optional visible "CRediT-verified contributor on CASRAI" badge.
Is the plugin free, and what licence is it under?: Yes. CASRAI CRediT Connector is free and open-source, released under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2) — the same licence as WordPress itself. There is no fee, no licence key, and no account required to run the plugin. You do need a CASRAI Verified Contributor Directory profile to link to, which is what gives the handshake its second, verified endpoint.
What are the system requirements?: The plugin runs on any self-hosted WordPress 5.8 or newer with PHP 7.4 or newer. It has no external service dependencies, no database tables of its own, and no paid tier. It does not run on WordPress.com sites that disallow custom plugins; it is built for self-hosted (wordpress.org) installations where you control the plugin directory.
Do I need an ORCID iD and a CASRAI profile to use it?: The plugin works with whichever identifiers you provide, but it delivers its full value when both ends of the handshake exist. An ORCID iD (free from orcid.org) is the shared identity anchor; a CASRAI Verified Contributor Directory profile is the verified public hub that the plugin points your journal back to. With both in place, the same author entity is described consistently on your journal, on your CASRAI profile, and on ORCID — which is exactly what lets knowledge graphs resolve one verified person.
Will this guarantee more search traffic?: No, and any plugin that promises a particular search outcome is overselling. What this plugin does is publish accurate, verifiable structured data — Schema.org Person and BlogPosting JSON-LD with resolvable sameAs identifiers and canonical CRediT role URIs — that search engines and knowledge graphs consume when they resolve your verified author identity. That is a genuine, standards-based E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) signal. It is not a trick; it is making the truth about your authorship machine-readable. What search engines do with that accurate information is up to them.
Where does the CRediT role data come from?: From the canonical CRediT taxonomy — the 14 contributor roles standardised as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, each with a stable URI at casrai.org/credit/roles/<slug>. The plugin references those URIs directly as Schema.org DefinedTerm identifiers, so the roles you assign on your journal resolve to the same definitions a publisher would use in JATS XML or a Crossref deposit.
Will the plugin slow down my site or add tracking?: No. The plugin emits a small block of inline JSON-LD in the page head and, optionally, a lightweight badge. It loads no external scripts on the front end, sets no cookies, and performs no tracking. It stores author identity in standard WordPress user meta and per-post roles in post meta — nothing leaves your server except the structured data search engines read from the page itself.
How is the badge verified, and what does rel="me" do?: The optional badge links from your journal to the author's CASRAI Verified Contributor Directory profile using rel="me", a standard relationship that asserts "this is the same person." Because the CASRAI profile links back to the journal and to ORCID, and all three share the same ORCID iD, the links form a reciprocal, verifiable identity chain rather than a one-way claim. CASRAI editors verify directory profiles before they go live, which is what makes the destination of the badge a trusted endpoint.

Download the plugin (.zip) ↓

Where to go next

Verified Contributor Directory — establish the editor-verified CASRAI profile your journal links back to.
Manage your author profile — set your ORCID iD, journal URL, and CRediT roles on the CASRAI side of the handshake.
CRediT in JSON-LD — the Person + roleName encoding the plugin emits, in full.
Directory terms — the terms governing verified directory profiles and their use.