Legal

Verified Contributor Directory — Terms

The terms for membership of the Verified Contributor Directory and the public author profiles at /credit/authors. The directory is identity-gated, screened automatically and reviewed by a CASRAI editor before anything goes live, never pay-to-publish: a subscription funds the directory and the editorial review, it does not buy approval of any link.

Last updated: 12 June 2026.

These terms cover the CASRAI Verified Contributor Directory — a paid membership that gives you a public author profile linked to the journals and editorial roles you contribute to. They sit alongside our general Terms of use and Privacy policy; where the general terms and these directory terms both apply, both are in force, and these add the specifics for paid membership. The directory exists to make genuine contribution visible and verifiable. It is not a way to buy a listing: payment funds the directory and the editorial review, it does not purchase approval of any journal link, blog, or editorial claim. Links are screened automatically and then reviewed by a CASRAI editor before they appear.

Section 1

Scope

These terms apply to your Verified Contributor Directory membership and to the public author profiles published at /credit/authors. They govern how membership is billed, how your profile becomes (and stays) public, the automated screening and CASRAI editorial review every link and role claim passes through before it appears, and your rights to make your profile non-public or delete your data.

CASRAI is a standards body. The directory is one of our services, but it does not change the status of the Dictionary, the CRediT vocabulary, or any standard we steward — those remain openly licensed and are never gated behind directory membership. Being a paying member of the directory confers no special standing in CASRAI’s editorial or standards work.

Section 2

Membership and billing

Directory membership is a monthly subscription, billed through Stripe. We don’t store your card details — Stripe handles payment processing and holds the payment instrument. There are three tiers, which differ in how many journals you may claim on your profile:

Verified Author — $150 / month, up to 3 journals.
Verified Editor — $300 / month, up to 6 journals.
Verified Publisher — $550 / month, up to 10 journals.

Subscriptions auto-renew monthly on the anniversary of the day you subscribed, at the then-current price for your tier, until you cancel. You can cancel any time from your profile settings; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid period (see Refunds and cancellation). You can move between tiers; a tier change takes effect at the start of the next billing period and Stripe prorates as applicable.

Section 3

Public visibility is tied to an active subscription

Your profile is listed publicly in the directory and reachable at its public profile URL only while your subscription is active. This is a deliberate, plainly-stated rule:

If a payment fails, or your subscription lapses, or you cancel, your profile is automatically made non-public — it is removed from the public directory at /credit/authors and its public profile URL stops resolving to a public page.
This happens automatically. There is no manual step, and a non-public profile is not listed, indexed, or linkable as a public CASRAI verified profile.

We retain your profile data for a limited grace period after a subscription ends so you can resubscribe and restore visibility without rebuilding your profile from scratch. If you resubscribe within the grace period, your profile (and its published journal links and role claims) is restored. After the grace period, retained profile data may be permanently deleted. You can also delete it yourself at any point — see Deletion and data rights.

Section 4

Deletion and data rights

You stay in control of your profile and your data. From your profile settings you can:

Make your profile non-public at any time — this unpublishes it from the directory and its public URL immediately, without cancelling your subscription (you can make it public again later).
Delete individual journal claims — remove a single journal link or editorial-role claim without affecting the rest of your profile.
Permanently delete your entire CASRAI account — this erases your profile, all your journal claims, and your membership data. Deletion is permanent and is not the same as cancelling: cancelling stops billing and unpublishes the profile but retains data for the grace period, whereas account deletion removes the data.

The directory is built to be erasure-friendly. If you are in the UK, EEA, or another jurisdiction with data-protection rights, you may exercise your rights of access, rectification, erasure, portability, and restriction as described in our Privacy policy. To make a data request — including an erasure request you can’t complete from your settings — email privacy@casrai.org. We respond within 30 days (usually sooner). Note that billing records Stripe is legally required to retain for tax and accounting purposes sit outside what we can delete on request.

Section 5

Automated screening and editorial review

This is the part that makes the directory worth something: every linked journal or blog is screened automatically and then reviewed by a CASRAI editor before it appears. When you add a journal link or a blog, it first runs through automated checks — a real-domain web-presence check (measured web-presence data confirming an established domain), a denied-sector denylist (adult, gambling, payday lending, essay mills, counterfeit, pharma-spam, and similar are blocked), an off-site-redirect check, and a dead-link check. A link that clears the automated pre-screen is then reviewed and approved by a CASRAI editor before it goes live; links that fail the pre-screen, or that an editor does not approve, are not listed. This two-layer, human-edited gate is what keeps the directory a genuine identity registry, not an open link target.

CASRAI may reject any link at editorial review, and remove, at any time, any entry later found to be spam, deceptive, low-quality, off-topic, malicious, or misrepresenting a role. We may do this without a refund, because the subscription funds the directory and the editorial review runs regardless of the outcome. Payment never guarantees a listing. A tier’s journal allowance is a ceiling on how many links you may add, not a promise that any particular link will pass the automated pre-screen or be approved by an editor.

Section 6

Acceptable use and misrepresentation

The directory’s value depends on every profile being truthful. Don’t:

Claim an editorial role you don’t hold, or overstate one you do.
Impersonate another person, or create a profile in someone else’s name.
Submit spam links, link-farm journals, or content designed to game search or reputation.
Link to deceptive, low-quality, or malicious content.

False role claims, impersonation, or spam result in removal of the offending content and may lead to termination of your account — without a refund. Where a claim misrepresents a role, we will remove it whenever we find it. We treat the directory’s integrity as protecting both contributors and the readers who rely on it, whether the automated pre-screen catches a problem at submission, a CASRAI editor declines it at review, or we remove it afterward.

Section 7

Refunds and cancellation

Membership is billed monthly. You can cancel any time from your profile settings; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid period, so you keep access and visibility until then. We do notoffer partial refunds for the unused remainder of a billing period, except where a refund is required by applicable law (some consumer-protection regimes grant a cooling-off or refund right — we honour those where they apply to you).

On cancellation — as on a failed payment or a lapse — your profile is unpublished and made non-public as described in Section 3, with the same limited grace period before retained data may be deleted.

Section 8

Changes to these terms; contact

We may update these terms. For material changes — anything that meaningfully shifts pricing, what visibility you get, or how your data is handled — we’ll give notice by email to members and a prominent note on this page before the change takes effect. The current revision is dated at the top of this page.

Questions about directory membership, billing, a removal decision, or these terms: membership@casrai.org. For data and privacy requests specifically, use privacy@casrai.org (see Privacy policy).

Related legal pages

Last reviewed by the CASRAI Editorial Board: June 2026.