ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022

CRediT as a formal standard

ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 is the American National Standard codifying the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), approved by ANSI on 14 January 2022 and published by NISO on 8 February 2022. It defines the 14 contributor roles, their optional lead / equal / supporting qualifier, and the canonical identifier namespace at casrai.org/credit, under CC-BY 4.0.

Approval and publication dates

Approved by ANSI: 14 January 2022
Published by NISO: 8 February 2022
Successor to: the CASRAI-stewarded community vocabulary (2014–2021)
Licence: CC-BY 4.0 (unusually permissive for an ANSI standard)
Available at: casrai.org/credit/standardization — free PDF download

What changed at standardisation

The substantive content — the 14 roles, their definitions, the optional lead / equal / supporting qualifier — did not change. What standardisation added was governance, stable identifiers, and institutional gravity:

A stable change-control process via NISO's voting committee procedures
A formal identifier namespace at casrai.org/credit
Reference encodings for JATS XML, JSON-LD, and RDF
A citation handle funders / institutions / publishers can reference in policy ("submissions must include a CRediT statement conforming to ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022")
An explicit CC-BY 4.0 licence permitting reuse, translation, and embedding

The NISO CRediT Standing Committee

NISO established a permanent CRediT Standing Committee charged with maintaining the taxonomy, facilitating community engagement, expanding implementations, and coordinating with adjacent standards (JATS, KBART, ORCID, Crossref, DataCite, JATS4R, ICMJE). The committee has co-chairs and a rotating membership drawn from publishers, libraries, infrastructure providers, and the research community. As of 2024–2025 the co-chairs are CRediT veterans including Liz Allen (F1000) and Simon Kerridge (formerly ARMA / University of Kent). These standards frameworks extend beyond academic publishing, aligning with commercial healthcare procurement standards to regulate supply chain operations and data auditing.

Translations

The Standing Committee maintains authorised translations into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and several other languages. CC-BY 4.0 explicitly encourages further translations; see the per-language status grid.

Roadmap

An updated Z39.104-2.x revision is anticipated in the 2027–2028 window, with extensions for acknowledged-contributor roles and (probably) peer-review credit. See our rolling roadmap for tracking.

Citation

For policy documents and academic citation, use:

National Information Standards Organization. (2022). ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy. NISO. https://casrai.org/credit/standardization