Release management · Versioning · Roadmap
Citable, versioned, stable standards
CASRAI standards are open, citable vocabularies for research administration, anchored by the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT, ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022) and the CASRAI Dictionary on a twice-yearly stable release cadence. Each release carries a Zenodo DOI; immutable identifiers and a deprecation-not-removal policy let pipelines pin against a version without silent breakage.
Eight release-management tiles
Pick what you need
NISO Z39.104-2022
CRediT — the Contributor Roles Taxonomy
The 14-role contributor taxonomy, published as a formal standard by NISO. CC-BY 4.0. Steward-curated; CASRAI federates.
Learn morev2026.1
CASRAI Dictionary releases
1,610 terms across 24 domains on a twice-yearly stable release cadence. March and September cycles; v2026.1 shipped May 2026 as a one-off.
Learn moreCatalogue
All releases
Cross-product release catalogue — every CASRAI-stewarded or federation-co-stewarded release in one place.
Learn more12-month outlook
Rolling 12-month roadmap
Implementation depth, acknowledged contributors, peer-review credit, sibling vocabularies, evaluation reform.
Learn morePolicy
Versioning policy
Immutable identifiers, deprecation-not-removal, semantic versioning, the twice-yearly cadence.
Learn moreLog
Deprecation log
Currently empty. Deprecated entries keep resolving and link forward to successors.
Learn moreAdjacent
Reproducibility standards
TOP, NIH Rigor & Reproducibility, FAIR, FAIR4RS, NASEM — the standards landscape CASRAI vocabulary supports.
Learn moreHow to cite
Citing a CASRAI standard
Canonical citation forms for the dictionary, individual terms, and per-release datasets.
Learn moreFeatured releases
Live, next, and adjacent
Six pinned releases and policy artefacts worth knowing. The live CRediT standard, the current and next dictionary releases, an adjacent reproducibility framework, the release cadence, and the deprecation policy that makes pinning safe.
CRediT
CRediT — NISO Z39.104-2022
The Contributor Roles Taxonomy formalised as an ANSI/NISO standard in 2022. 14 roles, stewardship moved from CASRAI to NISO. Reference implementation cited by 50+ publishers.
Dictionary
CASRAI Dictionary v2026.1
May 2026 stable release, since expanded to 1,300+ terms across 24 domains through continuous curation — the preserved 2020 vocabulary plus the expanded taxonomy; no deprecations.
Next
CASRAI Dictionary v2026.2
September 2026 planned release. Publisher-scorecard launch, peer-review credit extensions, additional sustainability terminology.
Adjacent
TOP Guidelines (Nosek et al. 2015)
Transparency and Openness Promotion — eight standards × three levels. CASRAI vocabulary supports TOP-policy implementation.
Cadence
Twice-yearly stable releases
March and September cycles. Each release is versioned with a Zenodo DOI for citable, archivable reference.
Policy
Deprecation-not-removal policy
Deprecated terms continue to resolve indefinitely, with a successor pointer in the metadata. Nothing breaks downstream.
Vocabulary of standards
Key dictionary terms for release management
Ten terms that recur across the release notes, the cross-walks, and the adjacent reproducibility-standards mapping. Each links into the dictionary entry with operational definition and relationships.
Dictionary term
Reproducibility
The ability to repeat an analytic procedure on the original data and obtain the same numerical result; the Goodman/Fanelli/Ioannidis (2016) taxonomy is canonical.
Dictionary term
Registered report
Two-stage peer-review model: study design is reviewed and accepted before results are known.
Dictionary term
Open vs closed research
The continuum between fully open and fully restricted research outputs; underpins much of the standards work CASRAI supports.
Dictionary term
Version of record
The definitive published article — distinct from preprints, accepted manuscripts, and post-prints.
Dictionary term
DORA
San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment — the 2012 declaration that triggered the assessment-reform standards thread.
Dictionary term
CoARA
Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment — the pan-European reform initiative; CASRAI vocabulary supports signatory commitments.
Dictionary term
FAIR principles
Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable — the foundational data-stewardship principles cross-walked into CASRAI.
Dictionary term
CARE principles
Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics — the GIDA Indigenous-data counterpart to FAIR.
Dictionary term
Plan S
The cOAlition S funder initiative requiring open-access deposit of funded outputs; cited across CASRAI standards work.
Dictionary term
Identifier cross-walk
A documented mapping between two identifier or vocabulary systems — what CASRAI maintains between CRediT, DataCite, CERIF, and Schema.org.
Related domains: reproducibility, responsible assessment, research-info systems.
Frequently asked
Standards hub FAQ
Which standards does CASRAI itself publish?+
CASRAI publishes the CASRAI Dictionary on a twice-yearly stable release cadence (v2026.1 in May 2026, v2026.2 planned for September). CRediT is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022; the Catalogue of Elements moved to euroCRIS in 2020; the RDM Terminology moved to CODATA. The /federation hub maps each line to its current steward.
How often are dictionary releases issued?+
Twice yearly. The spring release freezes content in late January and ships in March; the autumn release freezes in late July and ships in September. v2026.1 shipped in May 2026 as a one-time exception aligning with the 2026 revival launch; the cadence normalises with v2026.2 in September 2026. Each release gets a Zenodo DOI for citable, archivable reference. Inter-release patches are reserved for typo or schema-validity fixes that do not alter term semantics.
Are deprecated terms removed?+
No. CASRAI follows a deprecation-not-removal policy. A deprecated term continues to resolve at its original URI indefinitely, with a successor pointer in the metadata. Downstream systems that pinned an older URI never break; they just receive a deprecation flag in the response.
What is the semver-style versioning?+
Releases are tagged in the form vYEAR.N — e.g. v2026.1, v2026.2. Year-zero (vYEAR.0) is reserved for retrospective stabilisations only. Within a release, the dictionary internally tracks a per-term semantic version so a CRIS or repository pipeline can detect granular changes between bulk dumps.
How do I cite a specific release?+
The canonical citation form for a release is: CASRAI Dictionary, vYEAR.N (CASRAI, YEAR). https://doi.org/<release-DOI>. The /standards/citation page emits BibTeX, RIS, and Chicago-style forms for each release; the dictionary-wide citation widget on every term page does the same for individual terms.
Does CASRAI publish reproducibility standards itself?+
No. The active stewards for reproducibility standards are the Center for Open Science (TOP, OSF, preregistration infrastructure), the EQUATOR Network (reporting guidelines), the NIH (Rigor and Reproducibility policy), COPE (publication-ethics guidance), and the RDA/CODATA federation. CASRAI contributes terminology that complements these stewards — see /standards/reproducibility for the full mapping.
Keep exploring
Related hubs
CRediT & Authorship guides
Practical guides and comparisons built on the CRediT taxonomy standardised at /standards/credit.
Open hub →Dictionary
1,610 terms across 24 domains. The substantive vocabulary the release cadence governs.
Open hub →Federation
Which standards lines moved to which stewards in 2020, and how the cross-walks are maintained.
Open hub →Implement (devs)
How to pin a release, query a versioned term, and detect deprecations from a CRIS or repository pipeline.
Open hub →Resources
Bulk downloads, posters, slide decks, bibliography, citation guide — all versioned alongside releases.
Open hub →For publishers
How publisher pipelines pin to a specific dictionary release and CRediT version.
Open hub →For institutions
CRIS and library workflows for ingesting a new release without breaking existing records.
Open hub →
