Volunteer contributors
Volunteer with CASRAI
Not every contribution fits a working group. Editorial review, documentation, advocacy, and code contributions all sit outside the formal cycle and all matter.
CASRAI is community-stewarded. The dictionary is built by working groups, but a great deal of the work that keeps the dictionary useful happens around the edges — reviewing candidate entries, writing implementation guidance, presenting at conferences, fixing bugs in the website and the schema mappings. Volunteering is the entry point for that work.
What volunteering is
Volunteering is open, informal, and credited. There is no membership track to clear, no fee, no application form. You write to [email protected], describe the contribution you have in mind, and the editorial board matches you to the right point of contact.
Volunteer work is recognised under the same conventions as the dictionary itself. Where a contribution constitutes authorship of a guide, an explainer, or a piece of code, the contributor is credited by name. Where it is editorial review, it is recorded against the entry's editorial-meta block. The dictionary is released under CC-BY 4.0; attribution is non-negotiable.
Four common tracks
Editorial review
Reviewing candidate dictionary entries during their public-review windows, copy-editing draft entries before release, and second-reading translations. Suits practitioners with domain standing and an eye for plain English (or the equivalent in another language).
Documentation
Writing guides, worked examples, and onboarding material for institutions and publishers adopting the dictionary. Includes implementation notes for CRIS vendors, JATS contributor-role examples, and case studies of how a real journal or institution moved to CRediT.
Advocacy
Presenting the dictionary at conferences, running internal workshops at your institution, writing perspectives pieces for the editorial board, contributing to library guidance pages. The federation provides slide decks at /resources/presentations and brand assets at /resources/logos.
Code contributions
The dictionary website, schema mappings, JSON-LD contexts, and integration tooling all live in public repositories. Open issues, pull requests, and feature proposals are welcomed. Coordination runs through the editorial board's technical liaison.
If you are not sure where you fit
Most volunteers do not arrive with a clear track in mind. The pattern is to write briefly to [email protected], describing your standing, the time you can give, and the kind of work that interests you. The editorial board has a standing list of unstaffed tasks against each track and matches volunteers to them as they arrive.
Working-group track is separate
If you want to shape candidate dictionary entries directly — propose terms, vote on definitions, sit on a chair's editorial group — the route is the working groups, not general volunteering. The process is documented at /get-involved/working-groups. Translation work also has its own route, documented at /get-involved/translate.
Related authority
The recognition convention for volunteer contributions follows the contributorship pattern established by the Allen et al. (2014) Nature paper and the formal ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 CRediT standard that grew out of it. Where the contribution maps cleanly to a CRediT role, it is recorded as such.
Get in touch
The single point of contact is [email protected]. Full editorial contact protocol is documented at /contact/editorial.
