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).

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