Release history

Dictionary changelog

The CASRAI Dictionary ships on a twice-yearly cadence — one stable release in spring, one in autumn — with every added, modified or deprecated entry logged. v2026.1 is the current release; v2025 is documented as the revival year; v2027.1 and v2027.2 are planned. Earlier versions remain resolvable at their versioned URLs.

How to read this changelog

Each release below records what shipped: which dictionary_term, object_template and picklist entries entered the corpus, which machine-readable distributions became available on the canonical casrai.org host, and which schema or governance changes accompanied them. The cadence target is two stable releases per year, conventionally numbered vYYYY.1 in spring and vYYYY.2 in autumn, under the broader versioning policy. For the cross-product view that spans CRediT, the Dictionary and the federated vocabularies, see /standards/releases. Individual standards have their own release records under that index — including the formal CRediT line at ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022.

v2026.1 — “Vocabulary baseline”

v2026.1Current

2026-05-19

The inaugural release of the modern Dictionary. Imports the curated content that survived the 2018-era CASRAI Catalogue, re-tags it across the new six-domain taxonomy, and ships the first machine-readable CRediT distributions on the casrai.org canonical page. v2026.1 is the baseline against which every subsequent release is diffed.

What shipped

48 dictionary_term entries imported from the legacy Open Access Glossary, cross-tagged across 6 domains — knowledge-equity (14), research-lifecycle (14), compliance-regulatory (8), data-infrastructure (6), research-outputs (5), funding-finance (1) — with the original community-curated definitions preserved verbatim.
123 object_template entries (Award, Book, Conference Paper, Research Dataset, Patent, Software, Person, Organization, Project, Output, Output Identifier and so on) carrying 1,035 enriched field definitions; the template layer is what makes the Dictionary describe records, not just words.
11 picklist entries — Contributor Roles (14), Output Types (35), Output Identifier Types (21), Licence Types (8), Reviewer Roles (5), Review Types (2), Person Identifier Types (2), Organisation Identifier Types (2) — plus stub picklists for Field of Application and Research Classification awaiting their first working-group pass.
A sample dictionary_term (fair-principles-assessment) shipped as a static template so future imports have a normative example for the slug pattern, the cross-tag shape, and the JSON-LD envelope.
First machine-readable CRediT distributions on casrai.org: /credit.ttl (SKOS-RDF Turtle), /credit.jsonld (Schema.org DefinedTermSet) and /api/credit.json (a JSON API for application developers). The NISO casrai.org/credit namespace remains canonical; these are convenience mirrors that resolve directly off the originating community.
GraphQL schema gains a PicklistValue object type, exposing every picklist entry to the Next.js renderer and to external clients hitting /wp/graphql.
Schema-graph depth: 1,878 JSON-LD blocks across the site at launch — every dictionary_term, every object_template field, and every picklist value carries a Schema.org DefinedTerm or PropertyValue payload.

v2025.0 — “Revival”

v2025.0Conceptual

2025

No formal release shipped in 2025, but the year is documented here as the inflection point. Domain ownership of casrai.org transferred under the joint stewardship statement signed by CODATA, euroCRIS and NISO; the site was rebuilt from scratch on a headless Next.js plus WordPress architecture; and CASRAI returned to active service as the originating community for vocabularies it had previously developed.

What shipped

Domain ownership of casrai.org formally transferred under the joint stewardship statement co-signed by CODATA, euroCRIS and NISO — the three federations that absorbed the work programmes CASRAI had stewarded during the 2010s.
New site architecture: WordPress as the headless content store for dictionary_term, object_template and picklist post types; Next.js 15 (Faust.js) for the public renderer; Caddy at the edge for routing, TLS and ~210 legacy backlink redirects.
CRediT standardisation handover to NISO (completed 2022) re-cast: CASRAI remains the originating community, the canonical bibliography curator, and the home of the JATS and JSON-LD implementation guides; NISO holds the change-control authority for the standard itself.
No new vocabulary content shipped under a vYYYY.N tag in 2025; all imports were staged for v2026.1.

v2027.1 — “Per-domain working-group passes”

v2027.1Planned

Target Q1 2027

The first cadence-release after v2026.1. By Q1 2027 each of the twenty working groups is expected to have completed an initial per-domain pass — proposing, defining, cross-tagging and reviewing 50–100 new dictionary_term entries in its area. v2027.1 also begins the translations rollout and consolidates terminology in two areas where adjacent standards are moving: machine-actionable DMPs and AI disclosure.

What shipped

20 working groups complete their first per-domain term passes — target volume is 50–100 new dictionary_term entries per domain over the year, taking the corpus from the 48-term v2026.1 baseline into the low thousands.
Translations rollout begins. The first five target languages are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, mirroring the CRediT translation set; each language gets per-term translations rather than only the canonical English label.
maDMP terminology pass — alignment with the Machine-actionable Data Management Plan Common Standard. The Dictionary becomes the cross-reference layer between maDMP fields and the equivalent CASRAI object_template fields.
AI disclosure terminology consolidation in coordination with COPE, picking up the rapidly stabilising vocabulary around generative-AI use disclosure in research outputs.

v2027.2 — “Saturation”

v2027.2Planned

Target Q3 2027

The second 2027 release targets saturation — every one of the twenty domains has been through at least one working-group pass, the Dictionary has its first per-release DOI, and the corpus is offered to BARTOC and FAIRsharing as a registered vocabulary. This release closes the rebuild phase of the 2025–2027 programme.

What shipped

Saturation target across all 20 domains. Every domain has a working group, every working group has shipped at least one per-domain pass, and no domain is still represented only by legacy Open Access Glossary terms.
DOI per release via DataCite. v2027.2 will be the first Dictionary release with a DataCite-minted DOI for the release dataset; older versions remain resolvable at their versioned URLs but the DOI is the new citable handle.
BARTOC registration submitted (Basic Register of Thesauri, Ontologies and Classifications) so the Dictionary is discoverable from the canonical KOS registry.
FAIRsharing registration submitted so funder and publisher mandates can cite the Dictionary by registry record rather than by URL.

v2026.1 in context

v2026.1 is deliberately a baseline rather than a complete release. The 48 dictionary_term entries imported from the Open Access Glossary are the surviving curated content from the 2010s CASRAI Catalogue; everything else in the corpus that was retrievable from the euroCRIS-preserved 2018 snapshot ships as object_template fields and picklist values. The point of the baseline is to put the new infrastructure under live load — every term has a canonical URL, a Schema.org DefinedTerm JSON-LD payload, a GraphQL representation, and a slot in the twice-yearly release cadence — before the working groups start adding volume in v2027.1.

CRediT distributions on casrai.org

CRediT itself is stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022; the canonical namespace is casrai.org/credit. Within v2026.1 the casrai.org host also publishes machine-readable CRediT distributions as convenience mirrors for the originating community — /credit.ttl in SKOS-RDF Turtle, /credit.jsonld in Schema.org DefinedTermSet form, and /api/credit.json as a plain JSON API. The 14 roles in those distributions are linked inline from the CRediT roles index, and their definitions are byte-identical to the NISO canonical. The history page explains how the same corpus came to be stewarded in two places.

v2025: the revival year

v2025 carries the “Revival” codename because no vocabulary content shipped under a release tag that year — but the structural decisions that v2026.1 depends on were all made in 2025. The CODATA, euroCRIS and NISO joint stewardship statement re-anchored domain ownership; the headless architecture replaced a long-dormant WordPress single-server install; and the working-group structure was re-constituted around the six-domain taxonomy that v2026.1 ships. None of that is a vocabulary change, so none of it gets a vYYYY.N tag, but it is the reason v2026.1 looks the way it does.

2027 — what to expect

v2027.1 in Q1 2027 should be the first release where adding terms is the dominant change. Each of the twenty working groups is targeting 50–100 new dictionary_term entries over the year; if the upper end of that range lands in v2027.1 the Dictionary will pass two thousand terms before the autumn release. v2027.2 in Q3 2027 targets saturation across the domains, the first DataCite DOI for a Dictionary release dataset, and registry submissions to BARTOC and FAIRsharing. The translations rollout (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese) begins in v2027.1 and continues across the rest of the year. AI-disclosure and maDMP terminology consolidation are flagged as parallel passes — neither is on a fixed v2027.x slot because both depend on adjacent standards (COPE, the RDA maDMP Common Standard) reaching their own stable states.

Adjacent records

For the formal CRediT line and other federation-co-stewarded releases, see the releases catalogue; the most recent formal CRediT release is ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. To propose a new dictionary_term or to flag one for revision, see /dictionary/contribute. To browse the current corpus by domain or by alphabet, use /dictionary/browse; to cite a specific term or a release dataset, see the citation guide and the bibliography.