20 years of research-info standards
History
From a 2006 Canadian non-profit through the 2014 CRediT stewardship, the 2020 wind-down and stewardship handover, the 2022 domain closure, and the 2026 revival.
2006 — founding
CASRAI was founded as a Canadian non-profit with the mission of reducing the administrative burden on the research community by publishing standard guidelines for funders, vendors, and institutions to build research-information systems on.
2010 — international repositioning
CASRAI repositioned itself as an international network of researchers, institutions, publishers, and funders developing standardised vocabularies and data profiles for research information exchange. The phrase the organisation used most often was "reducing administrative burden across the research lifecycle."
2014 — CRediT stewardship begins
The CRediT pilot — born of a 2012 Harvard / Wellcome workshop — needed an institutional home. CASRAI took stewardship in 2014, providing governance, a working-group facilitation infrastructure, and the diplomatic cover needed to convene publishers who wouldn't otherwise sit at the same table. This is the decision that made CRediT survive into widespread adoption.
2014–2019 — peak operations
The Catalogue of Elements grew. National chapters (CASRAI-UK, CASRAI-Canada) ran active working groups. The Dictionary at dictionary.casrai.org reached its mature form: 123 Object Templates, 10 Picklists, ~1,035 Object Fields, and an Open Access Glossary of 48 terms. Working groups produced standards work in 20+ domains.
2019 — DuraSpace chapter
CASRAI announced it would become a DuraSpace project — DuraSpace being the non-profit behind DSpace, Fedora, and VIVO — to share back-office infrastructure with a larger organisation. The DuraSpace / LYRASIS merger later that year disrupted the plan.
2020 — wind-down decision
The CASRAI board announced the organisation would cease operations. The board negotiated a distributed stewardship arrangement with three trusted bodies, with a joint statement issued by all three:
- NISO took the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) and formalised it as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022.
- euroCRIS took the Catalogue of Elements as an enrichment to CERIF, preserved at
github.com/EuroCRIS/CASRAI-Dictionaries. - CODATA took the Research Data Management Glossary, renaming it the Research Data Management Terminology.
23 June 2022 — domain closure
The casrai.org website was archived and the domain scheduled to close. CRediT moved fully to casrai.org/credit.
2026 — the revival
CASRAI is reborn as a community-stewarded standards organisation, federated with NISO / euroCRIS / CODATA / RDA rather than duplicating their work. The 2026 revival is built on the preserved assets — the CRediT taxonomy under NISO, the Catalogue of Elements under euroCRIS, the RDM Terminology under CODATA — and adds modern net-new vocabulary across the 20 dictionary domains.
CASRAI Dictionary v2026.1 launches on 17 May 2026 with 48 terms (the Open Access Glossary), 10 picklists, 123 object templates, and the 20-domain taxonomy. The roadmap targets ~520 terms across all 20 domains by v2027.2.
Honest continuity framing
We use the CASRAI name with continuity framing — speaking in the present tense, claiming the lineage from 2006 — but we don't paper over the 2020 wind-down. The Dictionary, the working groups, the editorial board are all renewed. The mission is the same. The substantive standards work continues to be stewarded primarily by NISO, euroCRIS, and CODATA in the relationships established in 2020.
