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CASRAI

Self-assessment and public registry

Publisher implementation scorecard

Five criteria for what a complete CRediT implementation looks like at a publisher, from structured capture at submission through to acknowledged-contributor recognition. Self-assessment opens with site release v2026.2.

Why a scorecard

The Hosseini et al. study in Learned Publishing (2026) and parallel work in Scientometrics document that publisher CRediT implementation depth varies enormously. Many publishers that “support” CRediT in policy emit only a narrative paragraph at the end of the manuscript; only a smaller subset capture roles in structured form, emit them in JATS XML and deposit them to Crossref in a way that propagates downstream to ORCID and the institutional CRIS layer.

The scorecard formalises the implementation depth into a five-criterion rubric. Publishers self-assess and self-register; CASRAI publishes the register publicly. The goal is not to name and shame — the criteria are demanding, and partial implementation is the norm — but to give research-office staff, institutional CRIS administrators and authors a clear view of where the structured-metadata pipeline actually completes end-to-end.

The self-assessment portal opens with site release v2026.2 in September 2026. The criteria below are the v1.0 rubric; expected to evolve through annual review in coordination with the NISO CRediT Standing Committee.

The v1.0 rubric

Five criteria for complete implementation

Criterion 1

Structured capture at submission

What it means
The submission system presents authors with a controlled-vocabulary CRediT role picker at the manuscript-submission step. Roles are captured as structured selections, not free text.
Why it matters
Free-text contributorship paragraphs cannot reliably emit downstream as JATS XML or Crossref metadata. The structured-vs-narrative gap documented by Hosseini et al. (Learned Publishing, 2026) starts here.
Evidence required
Screenshot of the role-picker UI in the publisher's instance of Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, PubSweet, OJS or Scholastica.
Criterion 2

JATS XML output with NISO URIs

What it means
The published article XML includes the JATS <role> element on each contributor, with the vocab-term-identifier attribute set to the canonical NISO URI for each role.
Why it matters
Downstream systems (institutional CRIS, ORCID, Crossref consumers) rely on the canonical URIs to disambiguate role labels and to round-trip the data without semantic loss.
Evidence required
A representative published article XML file, with the <role> elements present and the URIs matching https://casrai.org/credit/contributor-roles/...
Criterion 3

Crossref deposit including CRediT

What it means
The publisher's Crossref deposit (schema 5.5 or higher) includes the <contributor_role> element with the canonical NISO URI for each role attributed to each contributor.
Why it matters
Crossref is the primary aggregator for downstream consumers. Without the deposit step, institutional CRIS systems and bibliometric services cannot ingest the role data.
Evidence required
A representative Crossref deposit XML payload, or a Crossref REST API response for a recent article showing the contributor-role data.
Criterion 4

ORCID propagation

What it means
Where contributors have ORCID iDs (provided at submission or resolved from the publisher's record), the publisher pushes the contribution roles to the contributor's ORCID record via the ORCID API.
Why it matters
The contribution then appears on the researcher's public ORCID profile, threading the contribution into the wider PID network.
Evidence required
A sample ORCID record entry for a recent article, showing the contribution roles attributed by the publisher.
Criterion 5

Acknowledged-contributor support

What it means
The publisher supports CRediT-style role attribution for acknowledged contributors who do not meet the authorship bar (medical writers, statisticians, laboratory technicians), either through a structured acknowledgements field or through an editorial workflow that captures it explicitly.
Why it matters
The acknowledged-contributor exclusion is the most often-cited limitation of current CRediT adoption (see the Wikipedia editorial summary of CRediT criticisms and the Hosseini et al. 2026 paper). Publishers willing to extend recognition are operationally ahead of the standard.
Evidence required
Author guidance or workflow documentation showing how the publisher captures and emits acknowledged-contributor roles.

Scoring

Publishers are scored on each criterion independently and listed in the public register with their criterion-by-criterion outcome. There is no aggregate score: the rubric is designed to surface implementation pattern, not to rank publishers against each other. A publisher that captures structured metadata at submission but does not yet propagate to ORCID is operationally informative; conflating its position with a publisher that does neither would be misleading.

Evidence for each criterion is reviewed by the CRediT Standing Committee before listing. The register is published under CC-BY 4.0 and is intended for use by research-office staff, CRIS administrators and authors seeking to understand which of their submission venues complete the deposit chain.

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