Continental hub · 3 jurisdictions
CASRAI's North American coverage focuses on the three federal research systems that drive the continent's $750B+ R&D economy — the United States, Canada, and Mexico — together with the publisher, identifier, and assessment infrastructure that surrounds them.
North America hosts the world's deepest concentration of public research funding, scholarly publishing, and persistent-identifier infrastructure. The United States alone accounts for roughly $760 billion in gross R&D spending; Canada contributes a further C$40 billion through the federal Tri-Agency and provincial counterparts; Mexico, while smaller in absolute terms, anchors a Latin American open-science ecosystem with disproportionate global influence. CASRAI's continental coverage treats the three jurisdictions as a system rather than a list, because the journal-level CRediT infrastructure, ORCID consortium model, and ROR institutional registry that underpin the region's metadata stack do not respect federal borders.
Each country runs a distinct federal grant architecture — NIH and NSF in the US, the Tri-Agency in Canada, CONAHCYT in Mexico — but all three increasingly converge on the same publication-level reporting expectations. Contributor-role taxonomies, ORCID iDs, ROR identifiers, and DataCite-registered DOIs are now the lingua franca of grant-output reporting from Mexico City to Bethesda. The sections below summarise each jurisdiction, then surface the cross-border infrastructure that links them.
The US research-administration environment is the most heavily funded and procedurally complex on Earth. Federal funding flows primarily through the National Institutes of Health (NIH, ~$48B), the National Science Foundation (NSF, ~$11B), the Department of Energy Office of Science, NASA, USDA, and dozens of mission agencies. The 2021 National Security Presidential Memorandum 33 (NSPM-33) introduced the Common Disclosure Form, harmonising current-and-pending-support reporting across federal agencies — and pushing every NIH and NSF biosketch through the federated SciENcv tool.
On the publication side, the 2022 OSTP Nelson memo dismantles the 12-month embargo on federally-funded peer-reviewed articles by end of 2025. NIH's Public Access Policy already requires deposit in PubMed Central, and the NIH 2023 Data Management and Sharing Policy mandates a DMSP for every grant application. Author-side compliance increasingly happens at the journal door: every ICMJE-aligned biomedical journal — NEJM, JAMA Network, the Cell Press portfolio, the ASBMB and ACS catalogues, the AAAS Science family, and Wiley's US imprints — collect contributor roles at submission using the CRediT taxonomy. CASRAI's CRediT adoption page tracks the rolling list of US publishers that have shipped CRediT into their production submission systems.
The persistent-identifier layer in the US is held together by the ORCID-US Community Consortium, administered by LYRASIS, and by the institutional contributions to ROR — itself co-stewarded by Crossref, DataCite, and the California Digital Library. For authors navigating the funder-side of this stack, our funder mandates and persistent-identifiers guides walk through what a typical NIH or NSF awardee must report and when. The US country page covers the funder-level detail.
Canada is the birthplace of CASRAI — the Canadian Association of Standards in Research-Administration Information was founded in Ottawa in 2006 — and its federal research-administration architecture is one of the most coherent in the world. The Tri-Agency coordinates the three federal granting councils: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Together with the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Genome Canada, and the provincial funders — most prominently the Fonds de recherche du Québec — the Tri-Agency shapes the country's research output.
Two policies dominate the Canadian compliance picture. The Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications (2015, refreshed 2022) requires all peer-reviewed publications arising from federal funding to be freely accessible within 12 months. The Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy (2021) is more architecturally consequential: it requires every Canadian institution receiving Tri-Agency funding to publish an institutional RDM strategy, requires a Data Management Plan with applicable grant applications, and requires deposit of grant-output data in a recognised repository. The Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the successor body to Portage and Compute Canada) coordinates national infrastructure for compliance.
Identifier infrastructure is mature. The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) coordinates national licensing and ORCID adoption; the Canadian Common CV (CCV) is the federated researcher-profile tool used across Tri-Agency competitions and links into ORCID. Canada also leads on Indigenous data governance: the OCAP principles for First Nations data and the broader CARE framework are reflected in Tri-Agency expectations. For the funder-by-funder detail, see our Canada country page and the CASRAI history note on the organisation's Canadian origin.
Mexico's federal research coordination flows through the Consejo Nacional de Humanidades, Ciencias y Tecnologías (CONAHCYT, the rebranded CONACyT), restructured under the 2023 General Law on Humanities, Sciences, Technologies and Innovation. CONAHCYT runs the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (SNI), which assigns tiered researcher rankings that gate federal grant eligibility, supplementary stipends, and institutional promotion in many universities. The SNI tier system effectively functions as a national researcher-assessment framework comparable to the UK REF or Australia's ERA, though structured around individual rather than departmental evaluation.
On the publication and discovery side, Mexico anchors three open-access infrastructures with continent-wide reach: Latindex (the regional journal directory, hosted at UNAM), Redalyc (the open-access journal network operated by the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México), and Mexico's participation in SciELO. Together these form the most mature non-commercial, multilingual OA publishing infrastructure outside Europe — and they are central to how CRediT, ORCID, and ROR propagate through Latin American scholarship. CASRAI's CRediT standardisation and cross-walks work increasingly accounts for the Redalyc and SciELO metadata profiles.
Research-integrity frameworks operate jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction but converge on shared norms. In the US, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) within HHS handles fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism allegations involving Public Health Service-funded research; the NSF Office of Inspector General handles NSF-funded misconduct. Canada operates the Tri-Agency Framework: Responsible Conduct of Research, administered through the Secretariat on Responsible Conduct of Research, with binding policies on authorship, conflict of interest, and data integrity for every institution receiving Tri-Agency funds. Mexico's framework sits within CONAHCYT and the SNI evaluation process.
Authorship norms across the continent are anchored by the ICMJE recommendations and increasingly disambiguated through CRediT. The CRediT taxonomy — now an ANSI/NISO standard (Z39.104-2022) — gives editors, integrity officers, and reviewers a shared vocabulary for distinguishing conceptualisation from data curation from formal analysis, which is decisive when authorship disputes reach an integrity panel. CASRAI's CRediT for authors guide explains how the 14 roles are typically assigned in practice.
North American publishers led the early adoption of CRediT and continue to drive its rollout. Cell Press shipped CRediT into its Editorial Manager workflow in 2014; PLOS followed the same year; the AAAS Science family, the Wiley US imprints, the entire ACS journal portfolio, Elsevier's US-led journals, and the Nature Portfolio US imprints now collect contributor roles at submission. Among biomedical journals, Cell Press, the JAMA Network, eLife, and the BMC catalogue treat CRediT as standard authorship metadata. Among physical-sciences publishers, the ACS, AIP, APS, and IOP North American operations have all integrated CRediT into manuscript-tracking systems.
The practical consequence for North American researchers is straightforward: any author publishing in a major Anglophone journal in the life sciences, chemistry, physics, or general science is now expected to declare CRediT roles at submission. CASRAI's CRediT adoption tracker catalogues publisher-level commitments, and the standardisation page documents the ongoing NISO maintenance process. For implementers, the submission-systems integration guide covers Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, OJS, and EJP CRediT field expectations.
The North American identifier stack is unusually federated. ORCID adoption in the US is coordinated through the LYRASIS-administered ORCID-US Community Consortium, which provides discounted memberships and integration support to over 150 universities and research organisations. In Canada, ORCID-CA is coordinated through CRKN and the Tri-Agency's CCV system. Mexico's ORCID footprint is growing rapidly through Redalyc and SciELO ingestion.
ROR — the Research Organization Registry — was launched in 2019 with disproportionately heavy US and Canadian institutional contributions; the California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and Digital Science co-steward the registry. DataCite registers DOIs for research data globally, with strong North American consortium presence through DataCite Canada (coordinated through the Digital Research Alliance of Canada) and the heavy involvement of US institutional repositories. CASRAI's DataCite implementation and ORCID implementation guides cover the metadata-schema integration points; the PID stack guide walks authors through which identifier to use when.
The continental view above is necessarily compressed. CASRAI's per-funder, per-publisher, and per-standard pages go deeper on every topic introduced here. Start with the CRediT for authors guide if you are publishing; the funder mandates page if you are managing post-award reporting; the DataCite and ORCID implementation pages if you are building integrations; and the cross-walks page if you are reconciling Crossref, DataCite, JATS, or Dublin Core metadata across systems. The bibliography indexes the primary-source literature behind every page.
Frequently asked
The questions research administrators, librarians, and grants officers most often ask about the NA landscape.
NIH does not mandate CRediT at the grant-application stage, but virtually every NIH-indexed journal — including the NEJM, JAMA Network, Cell Press, PLOS, Nature Portfolio US imprints, and the entire ASBMB and ACS catalogues — collects CRediT contributor roles at submission. Authors funded by NIH should expect to declare CRediT roles for every publication arising from their award.
The Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications (in force since 2015, refreshed alongside the 2022 RDM rollout) requires that all peer-reviewed journal articles arising from CIHR, NSERC, or SSHRC funding be freely available within 12 months of publication — either through the journal (gold OA) or through an institutional or subject repository (green OA). The companion Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy (2021) requires institutional RDM strategies and DMPs for grant applications phased in by funding stream.
The ORCID-US Community Consortium, administered by LYRASIS, provides discounted ORCID memberships, technical-integration support, and community-of-practice resources to over 150 US universities, libraries, and research organisations. It is the largest national ORCID consortium globally.
NSPM-33 is the United States National Security Presidential Memorandum on research security, finalised in 2021 and enforced across federal agencies from 2024. It mandates a Common Disclosure Form for foreign components, current-and-pending support, and conflicts of interest or commitment for every federally-funded investigator. While NSPM-33 itself binds only US federal grantees, the disclosures it requires regularly capture activity by collaborators based in Canada, Mexico, and beyond.
CRediT is not built into the Canadian Common CV (CCV) at the application layer, but it is now standard practice in the Canadian publication record. NSERC and CIHR have signalled DORA-aligned responsible-assessment direction, and Canadian universities increasingly recognise CRediT taxonomy in tenure dossiers. Tri-Agency grant outputs flow through CRediT-collecting journals.
Mexico's federal coordination flows through CONAHCYT (the renamed CONACyT, restructured under the 2023 General Law on Humanities, Sciences, Technologies and Innovation). The Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (SNI) assigns researcher rankings that gate federal grant eligibility. Mexico participates strongly in the Latin American open-science ecosystem via Latindex, Redalyc, and SciELO, which together represent one of the most mature non-commercial OA publishing infrastructures globally.
Continue exploring
Each North American jurisdiction has its own CASRAI page covering funders, mandates, assessment frameworks, and active rules.
NIH, NSF, NSPM-33 Common Disclosure, OSTP Nelson memo, NIH PMC public-access, SciENcv biosketches, near-universal CRediT adoption across major US publishers.
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CASRAI's country of origin. Tri-Agency (CIHR + NSERC + SSHRC) coordinates federal funding; Tri-Agency Open Access (2015/2022) and RDM Policy (2021) plus the Canadian Common CV.
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Compare the North American landscape against the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, China, and other CASRAI-covered jurisdictions.
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