Reference
Joint statements
An index of the formal joint outputs that document how the CASRAI federation is constituted. The 2020 stewardship statement sits at the centre of this list and is the authoritative public record of the handover.
When several organisations co-author a position document, it carries more weight than any one of them speaking alone. The CASRAI federation has produced a small number of such documents; each is recorded below with a brief explanation of why it matters and the canonical link to read it in full.
2020 — Stewarding ex-CASRAI assets for the future
Signatories: National Information Standards Organization (NISO), euroCRIS, and CODATA.
Date: 2020.
Published on: all three organisations' websites simultaneously.
This is the single most important reference document for the post-CASRAI federation. The three signatory organisations confirmed publicly that each had accepted long-term stewardship of one specific CASRAI asset:
- NISO took on the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), formalised soon after as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022.
- euroCRIS took on the CASRAI Catalogue of Elements, preserved as a public repository and aligned with CERIF.
- CODATA took on the IRiDiuM Glossary, renamed the Research Data Management Terminology.
The statement also committed the three organisations to ongoing mutual coordination where the assets overlap — for example, where the Catalogue references CRediT roles, or where the RDM Terminology touches on contributor concepts that CRediT also defines. The visible artefacts of that coordination are the cross-references between the three sites and joint working-group representation.
Read the statement in its canonical published forms:
- NISO press release: Stewarding ex-CASRAI Assets for the Future
- CODATA: Stewarding ex-CASRAI Assets for the Future — joint statement
- euroCRIS: CASRAI domain handover
Why the statement matters
When a non-profit consortium winds down, its outputs commonly drift: a repository goes unmaintained, a website expires, a working group disperses, and within a few years the vocabulary that hundreds of institutions depend on becomes effectively unmaintained. The 2020 joint statement is the public commitment that prevented that outcome for CASRAI's substantive work.
Practically, the statement does three things. It identifies a single named steward for each surviving asset so that downstream consumers know who to ask. It commits the stewards to keep the assets up to date rather than freezing them at the 2020 hand-over point. And it acknowledges the inter-dependencies between the assets, so the stewards co-ordinate where the boundaries are fuzzy rather than each maintaining a separate parallel vocabulary.
What the statement does not cover
The statement covers the three substantive vocabularies. It does not cover:
- The CASRAI regional networks (CASRAI-UK, CASRAI-Canada), which are no longer convened as such. Some of their outputs have been picked up by adjacent organisations — Jisc and DCC in the UK, the Tri-Agency in Canada — but there is no single successor body.
- The annual CASRAI Reconnect meeting and the working-group convenings, which have not been reconstituted in any other forum.
- The casrai.org domain itself, which after the formal closure in June 2022 was at one point reused by content unrelated to the original consortium. The 2020 statement remains the authoritative public record of where the real assets live; current content at the casrai.org domain should not be treated as continuous with the historical consortium.
The vocabularies survived. The convening function did not. The federation index on this site is the closest thing to a continuation of that convening role.
Subsequent reaffirmations
The 2020 statement has not been superseded. Subsequent joint communications from the three stewards — for example, the joint Crossref and DataCite metadata guide that touches on contribution metadata, and the periodic NISO Standing Committee updates that reference euroCRIS and CODATA participation — operate within the framework the 2020 statement established rather than re-opening the question of stewardship.
