Institutional membership

Become a member institution

CASRAI is community-stewarded. Institutional membership formalises editorial voice in the working groups and access to the federation's coordinated briefings.

Membership is institutional, not individual. The dictionary is free to read and reuse under CC-BY 4.0, and individual participation in working groups is open at /get-involved/working-groups. Membership exists where an institution wants formal editorial standing, early access to release candidates, and a coordinated channel into the federation.

The three tiers

Tiers exist to align editorial voice with practice. A publisher's editorial concerns sit elsewhere from a university research office; an infrastructure vendor reads the same dictionary but acts on different terms. The tier you sit in is determined by your primary research-information role, not by size.

Universities and research-performing organisations

Who joins: Universities, hospitals, government research institutes, national academies.

Members in this tier shape the editorial agenda of the dictionary domains nearest to institutional practice — research integrity, responsible assessment, mentorship and career stages, narrative CVs, the funding lifecycle.

Standing invitation to nominate working-group members and chairs.
Pre-publication access to dictionary releases and the editorial change log.
Quarterly federation briefing covering NISO, euroCRIS, and CODATA activity.
Listed on the public membership register.

Publishers and editorial bodies

Who joins: Scholarly publishers, journal editorial offices, peer-review platforms, preprint servers.

This tier carries the contributorship and disclosure work — the CRediT extensions domain, AI use and disclosure, peer-review recognition, publisher workflow vocabulary.

Editorial liaison with the CRediT-extensions and AI-disclosure working groups.
Pre-publication review of publisher-facing dictionary entries.
Access to JATS, JSON-LD, and Crossref schema-mapping working documents.
Quarterly federation briefing with publisher-specific emphasis.

Infrastructure providers

Who joins: CRIS and RIM vendors, PID registries, repository platforms, identifier authorities.

Infrastructure members anchor the persistent-identifier, research-information-systems, and data-infrastructure domains. The dictionary only carries weight when the tools that run institutional research information honour it.

Editorial liaison with the PID, RIS, and data-infrastructure working groups.
Early access to schema mappings and JSON-LD context updates.
Voice in the interoperability protocol with euroCRIS CERIF and DataCite metadata kernel.
Quarterly federation briefing with vendor-relevant emphasis.

What membership is not

Not a paywall. Dictionary content is and remains CC-BY 4.0 for everyone.
Not an endorsement transaction. The federation does not certify products, accredit institutions, or sell badges.
Not a fee for working-group participation. Anyone qualified can join a working group without an institutional membership; see /get-involved/working-groups.

Federation context

The CASRAI assets — the dictionary and the related vocabularies — are stewarded jointly with NISO, euroCRIS, and CODATA under the 2023 joint stewardship statement. Institutional members of CASRAI participate in that federation through the editorial board's coordinated briefings.

Application process

Write to [email protected] with a one-page expression of interest naming your institution, the tier you believe applies, and the staff member who would act as primary contact.
The membership secretary confirms the tier and shares the current participation agreement. There is no application fee.
Once the agreement is signed, your institution is added to the public membership register and your nominated contact receives onboarding materials.
Working-group nominations can follow at any subsequent cycle; see /about/working-groups for the current roster and chairs.

Full process and contact protocol are documented at /contact/membership.