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Stewardship relationships · 8 partners

Federation, not duplication

CRediT is maintained by the NISO CRediT Standing Committee under ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, while CASRAI participates as the originator and stewards the wider Dictionary. The 2020 handover distributed CASRAI's other assets to euroCRIS (CERIF) and CODATA (RDM Terminology). CASRAI federates, cross-walks, and incubates rather than duplicating partner work.

Federation map
NISOCRediT stewardeuroCRISCERIF / catalogueCODATARDM terminologyRDAResearch dataORCIDPerson PIDCrossrefOutput DOIsDataCiteData DOIsARDCRAiD registryCASRAIEST. 2006

The 8 federation partners

Who stewards what

Each card opens the dedicated federation page with the substantive vocabulary slice, governance arrangements, and integration touchpoints.

No single body could steward every term that touches research administration. The federation model lets each steward own its slice — and lets the wider ecosystem rely on stable, citable cross-walks instead of re-derivation.
2020 Joint Stewardship Statement · CASRAI · NISO · euroCRIS · CODATA

Vocabulary across the federation

Key dictionary terms that cross partner boundaries

Twelve terms whose canonical definitions are stewarded by one federation partner and consumed by several others. The dictionary mirrors each via a sameAs pointer to the steward, keeping us in sync without re-deriving.

Dictionary term

FAIR principles

Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable — the canonical data-stewardship principles, widely embedded in federation cross-walks.

Dictionary term

CARE principles

Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics — the GIDA-stewarded Indigenous-data counterpart to FAIR.

Dictionary term

DORA

San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment — the 2012 declaration that triggered the assessment-reform federation thread.

Dictionary term

CoARA

Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment — the pan-European reform initiative federating dozens of national funders and universities.

Dictionary term

Plan S

The cOAlition S funder initiative requiring open-access deposit of funded outputs; cross-cuts every federation partner.

Dictionary term

cOAlition S

The funder coalition behind Plan S; CASRAI federation work routinely intersects Plan-S deposit and journal-flipping requirements.

Dictionary term

EOSC

European Open Science Cloud — the federated infrastructure layer that consumes much of the dictionary indirectly via OpenAIRE.

Dictionary term

OpenAIRE

Pan-European scholarly knowledge graph; consumes Crossref + DataCite + repositories and is a federation partner candidate.

Dictionary term

DataCite

DOI registration for datasets, software, and instruments; cross-walk between contributorType and CRediT roles.

Dictionary term

Crossref

DOI registration for scholarly publications; schema 5.5+ carries CRediT in deposit metadata.

Dictionary term

ORCID iD

The 16-digit persistent identifier for an individual researcher; the auto-propagation sink for Crossref-deposited works.

Dictionary term

RAiD

Research Activity Identifier (ISO 23527:2022) — ARDC is the registration authority and a federation partner.

Related domains: persistent identifiers, responsible assessment, Indigenous data & CARE, data infrastructure.

Federation FAQ

How the federation model works

What does CASRAI mean by "federation, not duplication"?+

CASRAI does not re-derive vocabulary that another standards body already publishes. Instead we point at canonical definitions via sameAs links, cross-walk our terminology to theirs, and incubate new vocabulary only where no existing steward owns the slice. The 2020 handover to NISO, euroCRIS, and CODATA formalised this distributed-stewardship model.

What was the 2020 stewardship handover?+

In 2020, CASRAI passed stewardship of three discrete vocabulary lines to dedicated stewards: the Contributor Roles Taxonomy moved to a partner body that now publishes it as a formal standard, the Catalogue of Elements moved to euroCRIS as CERIF enrichment, and the Research Data Management Terminology moved to CODATA. The joint statement is on /federation/joint-statements.

Why are some partner bodies referred to only by name on this hub?+

On this hub page we reference each partner by name and point at the dedicated /federation/<slug> page for the substantive detail. The per-partner page is where the cross-walks, governance arrangements, and integration touchpoints live. This keeps the hub navigable instead of duplicating the per-partner content.

Does CASRAI maintain the cross-walks itself?+

Yes. CASRAI publishes cross-walks at /federation/cross-walks for the major mappings: CRediT ↔ DataCite contributorType, CASRAI terms ↔ CERIF entities, RDM Terminology ↔ FAIR principles, and several others. Each cross-walk is versioned alongside its source vocabularies; deprecations carry forward in both directions.

How do RDA working groups fit into the federation?+

The Research Data Alliance is a multi-WG umbrella. CASRAI federates with several specific RDA working groups (DMP Common Standard, FAIR4RS, PIDINST, the Indigenous Data Sovereignty IG, others) rather than RDA as a single counterparty. The /federation/rda page lists every active touchpoint and which dictionary terms each WG owns the upstream definition for.

Can a new partner be added to the federation?+

Yes. The federation deliberately grows. CASRAI staff review proposals from standards bodies that steward a vocabulary slice complementary to existing partners. Proposals route via /get-involved; the bar is a recognised steward role, a published vocabulary or schema, and willingness to maintain a documented cross-walk back to the dictionary.

Adopted by research universities worldwide

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