As 2026 closes, this post sets out CASRAI’s priorities for 2027. The picture is one of consolidation and expansion: the work of the past several years on the Dictionary, CRediT, the federation, and the PID ecosystem has produced a substantial foundation; 2027 is the year to build on it. We are publishing the priorities here partly to commit to them publicly and partly to invite community feedback on where the emphasis should sit.
The Dictionary: from v2026.3 to v2027
The v2026.3 Dictionary release shipped in October 2026 with the consolidation work on AI disclosure, EU AI Act terminology, PID infrastructure refinement, PRISMA 2026 alignment, and Indigenous-data terminology. v2027, scheduled for mid-2027, will be a more substantial revision.
The v2027 scope includes: alignment with the ORCID 4.0 contribution model in the Dictionary entry structure; full multi-language scaffolding (with the first translations into Spanish, French, and Portuguese expected); refinement of the relation typing introduced in v2026.3; expanded coverage of the responsible-assessment domain reflecting the CoARA implementation progress; expanded coverage of the sustainable-research domain reflecting the operational state.
The Dictionary governance process will run a public consultation through spring 2027. The CASRAI Dictionary governance page details the process.
CRediT: the v3 question
The CRediT stewardship group is in active discussion on whether v3 is warranted. The 2026 community consultation on the AI-assistance question, the mentorship-role question, and the data-paper/software-paper mapping question is producing input. Our editorial board’s reading is that v3 is likely in 2027 or early 2028 if the consultation converges; the scope is more likely to be refinement and extension than wholesale redesign.
The CASRAI position on v3 priorities, drawn from our 2026 editorial coverage: refine the Supervision definition to recognise mentorship explicitly; add a sub-qualifier for the Supervision role; introduce sub-roles within Software for code-only outputs; clarify Investigation and Data curation granularity for data-paper contributorship; address AI assistance through a parallel structured disclosure rather than within CRediT. These are recommendations, not decisions; the stewardship group will resolve them.
The CASRAI CRediT governance page is the place to track the discussion and to contribute.
The federation: operational maturity
The CASRAI federation work — connecting ORCID, ROR, RAiD, DataCite, Crossref, OpenAIRE, and the major institutional integrators — has moved from design to operational maturity. The 2027 priority is to consolidate the integration patterns into a published CASRAI Federation Guide covering: the per-PID integration patterns; the cross-PID crosswalks; the institutional-CRIS integration patterns; the publisher-deposit patterns; the funder-deposit patterns. The Guide will be a living document maintained in collaboration with the partner organisations.
Specific 2027 federation milestones: ORCID 4.0 transition completion (most major integrations should be on 4.0 by mid-2027); EOSC Federation v2 alignment; RAiD expansion to additional jurisdictions; GLS-RAiD crosswalk completion; OpenAIRE Graph schema-evolution alignment.
Integration with the broader open-science agenda
CASRAI’s work sits inside a broader open-science agenda: FAIR data, CARE-aligned data governance, responsible assessment, open peer review, AI disclosure, sustainable research, knowledge equity, paper-mill response. The integration with the broader agenda is a 2027 priority.
Specific commitments. We will publish position papers on: the responsible-assessment work’s intersection with CRediT, the CARE-FAIR sequencing for institutional data governance, the AI-disclosure standardisation, the sustainable-research operational practice. We will participate in the major coordination forums (cOAlition S working groups, RDA Plenary, OpenAIRE workshops, EOSC Federation events, FORCE11 working groups, COPE forum). We will continue the news-publication cadence (weekly through 2027), expanding the topical coverage where the agenda warrants.
Tooling and integration
The CASRAI tooling layer — the Dictionary API, the AI disclosure helper, the CRediT JATS integration tools, the federation reference implementations — needs investment in 2027. The Dictionary API will gain GraphQL support alongside the existing REST endpoint; the AI disclosure helper will be updated quarterly with publisher policy changes; the CRediT JATS tools will gain ORCID 4.0 deposit-pattern support.
We will also invest in the institutional-integration tooling: reference scripts for CRIS-Crossref ingestion of CRediT, validation tools for institutional-deposit quality, dashboards that institutions can deploy to surface their CRediT coverage. The CASRAI tooling page tracks the available tools.
Community and governance
The CASRAI community is the engine of the work. In 2027 we will expand the working-group structure to cover the new domains (AI disclosure, sustainable research, Indigenous data governance with appropriate community leadership), refresh the editorial board to reflect the broadened domain coverage, and continue the partner-organisation engagement.
The CASRAI community page documents how to engage. Specific 2027 commitments: monthly working-group meetings open to the broader community; quarterly virtual symposia on emerging topics; an in-person 2027 CASRAI meeting alongside one of the major open-science events; annual reporting on the federation’s operational state.
What we are not doing
Three things we are explicitly not prioritising in 2027.
First, we are not building competing infrastructure to existing partners (ORCID, ROR, RAiD, Crossref, DataCite, OpenAIRE). CASRAI’s role is the connective tissue, the controlled vocabulary, the federation coordination. Building competing systems would be wasteful.
Second, we are not expanding into proprietary or commercial-platform spaces. The CASRAI work remains open, community-governed, and PID-and-open-standards-aligned.
Third, we are not chasing every emerging topic. The domain coverage in v2026.3 and v2027 is deliberate; topics that are not yet ready for stable terminology (some aspects of the deep-AI question, some aspects of the responsible-AI-in-research-itself question) will be tracked but not prematurely codified.
An invitation
The priorities above are a draft, not a commitment. We are publishing them now to invite community input. If you think the emphasis is wrong, the scope is too narrow or too broad, or the priorities should be different, please engage via the community page or directly with the editorial board.
The work of the past several years has built a substantial foundation. The work of 2027 is to consolidate, extend, and integrate. With the community’s engagement, we expect the year to produce visible progress against each of the priorities above.
Thank you for reading through 2026. The weekly cadence resumes in January 2027.
