CRediT stewardship: 2020 handover
NISO
The National Information Standards Organization stewards CRediT as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, following CASRAI's 2020 transfer of stewardship. CASRAI's dictionary links to NISO's canonical CRediT definitions via sameAs pointers.
What NISO stewards
The Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) as a formal standard: ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. Approved by ANSI on 14 January 2022; published by NISO on 8 February 2022.
The standard is published under CC-BY 4.0 — explicit reuse, translation, and embedding permission.
The NISO CRediT Standing Committee
NISO maintains a permanent Standing Committee for CRediT. Co-chairs include CRediT veterans like Liz Allen (F1000) and Simon Kerridge (formerly University of Kent / ARMA). The committee:
- Maintains the taxonomy (additions, clarifications, deprecations)
- Facilitates community engagement and implementation feedback
- Coordinates with adjacent standards (JATS, ORCID, Crossref, DataCite, ICMJE)
- Develops the roadmap (extensions for acknowledged contributors, peer-review credit)
How CASRAI's dictionary links to NISO's standard
- Every CRediT role page on this site declares
sameAslinking the canonical CRediT URI (casrai.org/credit/roles/conceptualization) to the corresponding NISO-published role definition - The dictionary's 14 CRediT-role mirrors link out prominently and mark NISO as canonical source
- CASRAI Dictionary release notes track NISO standard revisions
Why NISO
NISO was the natural steward for CRediT because it is an ANSI-accredited standards developer with an established process for maintaining, balloting, and revising formal standards — exactly the governance CRediT needed once it moved beyond a CASRAI-run controlled vocabulary. The NISO CRediT Standing Committee gives the taxonomy institutional continuity: co-chairs and members carry forward the working relationships built during CASRAI's stewardship, so the 2022 standardisation continued a working taxonomy rather than starting one from scratch.
