CRediT v2022.1 — ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022

v2022.1CurrentPublished 8 February 2022Steward: NISO

Release summary

ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy was approved by the American National Standards Institute on 14 January 2022 and published by the National Information Standards Organization on 8 February 2022. With that publication CRediT became a formal American National Standard, ending the eight-year period during which it had been stewarded by the CASRAI community as an informal but widely adopted vocabulary. Z39.104-2022 is published free of charge under CC-BY 4.0 — an unusually permissive licence for an ANSI standard — and is available from NISO under ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. For the long-form origin story, see /credit/history; for the standardisation treatment in detail, see /credit/standardization.

What changed from the v2014 community vocabulary

The substantive vocabulary — the 14 roles, their definitions, the optional lead / equal /supporting degree-of-contribution qualifier — did not change at standardisation. What changed was the governance, identifier and encoding scaffolding around the vocabulary:

• Canonical identifier namespace moved to casrai.org/credit. The CASRAI-era casrai.org/credit/ URLs continue to resolve (and are 301-redirected to their NISO equivalents where they map one-to-one) but the NISO-side URI is now the canonical form for citation, JSON-LD@id values and JATS contrib-id attributes.
• A formal NISO Standing Committee was constituted as the maintenance body. The committee operates under NISO's voting-committee procedures, with publicly minuted meetings, a defined revision cycle and explicit cross-coordination with JATS, KBART, ORCID, Crossref, DataCite, ICMJE and the JATS4R working group. This replaced the looser CASRAI working-group model.
• Reference encodings were stabilised for JATS XML, JSON-LD and RDF. JATS guidance is published separately by JATS4R; the JSON-LD encoding is documented at /credit/jats and/credit/json-ld on the originating community's site.
• A citation handle usable in policy text — “submissions must include a CRediT statement conforming to ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022” — replaces the previous practice of citing the community vocabulary by the 2014 Nature paper.
• CC-BY 4.0 licensing was made explicit on the standard itself, removing the previous ambiguity about reuse and translation rights that had hampered some institutional adoption.

The 14 roles

v2022.1 carries forward the same 14 roles published with the 2014 Nature paper. Each links to its canonical page on casrai.org, which mirrors the NISO definition byte-for-byte and adds a Schema.org DefinedTerm JSON-LD payload, an FAQ rich-result block, and links to the JATS / JSON-LD encoding examples.

• Conceptualization
• Data curation
• Formal analysis
• Funding acquisition
• Investigation
• Methodology
• Project administration
• Resources
• Software
• Supervision
• Validation
• Visualization
• Writing — original draft
• Writing — review & editing

Stewardship transition

The stewardship arrangement underpinning v2022.1 is the outcome of the joint stewardship statement co-signed by CODATA, euroCRIS and NISO as CASRAI wound down its programme office in 2020–2021. Under that statement each of the major CASRAI work programmes moved to the body best positioned to maintain it long-term: CRediT to NISO as a formal standard, the Catalogue of Elements to euroCRIS as a CERIF enrichment, and the Research Data Management Terminology to CODATA as a working-group artefact. The CRediT transition completed on 8 February 2022 with the publication of Z39.104-2022; from that date NISO is the change-control authority for the standard, while CASRAI remains the originating community.

What stays at CASRAI

Standardisation moved the change-control authority to NISO, but a useful set of artefacts remains here at the originating community. CASRAI continues to maintain:

• The originating community — the working groups, the diplomatic cover, and the long-form history. See /credit/history.
• The JATS implementation guide at /credit/jats — how to encode a CRediT statement in a JATS XML manuscript, with the recommended <contrib> /<role> shape and the vocab-identifier attribute.
• The JSON-LD encoding guide at /credit/json-ld — the recommended Schema.org shape for embedding CRediT in scholarly metadata payloads, including the linkage to casrai.org/credit URIs.
• The canonical /credit page on casrai.org as the originating-community URL, with the full 14-term DefinedTermSet JSON-LD inline, plus the SKOS-RDF Turtle, JSON-LD and JSON API distributions shipped in Dictionary v2026.1.
• The bibliography at /resources/bibliography — every paper, editorial and policy document referencing CRediT, from the 1997 JAMA editorial onwards.

Reference

For policy documents and academic citation:

National Information Standards Organization. (2022). ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy. NISO. ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022.

The 2014 Nature paper remains the citation for the taxonomy itself — Allen, Brand, Scott, Altman & Hlava, Nature 508, 312–313 (doi:10.1038/508312a). For the full standardisation treatment see /credit/standardization; for the origin story see /credit/history; for the cross-product release index see /standards/releases and for the CASRAI Dictionary cadence see /dictionary/changelog. Adjacent federation pages: NISO, euroCRIS, CODATA.