Dictionary · v2026.1 · CC-BY 4.0
The CASRAI Dictionary: A Research Administration Glossary
The CASRAI Dictionary is a citable, machine-readable controlled vocabulary for research administration, containing 1242 definitions across 24 thematic domains in release v2026.1. Stewarded by 20 community working groups; federated with NISO, euroCRIS, CODATA, and RDA; published under CC-BY 4.0 for unrestricted reuse.
What's in v2026.1
- Entries
- 1242
- Domains
- 24
- Tracks
- 5
- Open formats
- 6
- · Stable URIs per entry
- · Schema.org
DefinedTermmarkup - · JATS · JSON-LD · OWL · RDF · CSV · BibTeX
- · Versioned with semver-style release tags
Start here
Browse the dictionary
Five ways into the full corpus, plus the 24 thematic domains below. Every entry is a stable, citable URI under CC-BY 4.0.
/dictionary/browse
Browse by domain
Entries grouped by their thematic domain, with status and CRIS-readiness filters.
/dictionary/a-z
A–Z index of all 1242 terms
Every entry, alphabetised under A–Z headings — the complete map of the dictionary.
/rdm-glossary
Research data management glossary
A curated RDM glossary: data infrastructure, DMPs, persistent identifiers, and reproducibility.
/dictionary/objects
Object templates
123 structured business objects — Award, Book, Conference Paper — for CRIS and RIM integration.
/dictionary/picklists
Controlled picklists
Enumerated value-lists — output types, contributor roles, licence types, access types.
/dictionary/templates
Document templates
23 composite documents — CVs, funding history, DMP ethics review — assembled from object fields.
/dictionary/search
Full-text search
Search definitions, picklists, sample values, and crosswalks with type-ahead suggestions.
Jump to a domain
24 domains across 5 tracks
The full domain map
Each domain is stewarded by a working group. Click any tile to read its entries.
Domain breakdown
Entries by domain · 1242 total
The full distribution of dictionary entries across the 20 stewardship domains, ordered by size. Track colour indicates stewardship cluster.
Compliance and regulatory
Research outputs (expanded)
Funding lifecycle and financial vocabulary
Research integrity and misconduct
Clinical research and clinical trials
Research data infrastructure
Mentorship, training, and career stages
The persistent identifier ecosystem
Research-information systems and integration
Research lifecycle stages and project metadata
Reproducibility and computational research
Grants management and sponsor compliance
CRediT extensions and adjacent contribution vocabularies
Responsible research assessment
Knowledge equity, diversity, global-south inclusion
AI and ML research outputs
Engagement, impact, and SDG alignment
Generative AI use and disclosure
Research security
Machine-actionable data management plans (maDMP)
Sustainable research and laboratory operations
Indigenous data governance — CARE principles
Technology transfer and commercialization
Scholarly publishing
Highlighted terms by domain
One representative entry per domain
A curated tour of high-value definitions — one entry per stewardship domain, chosen to illustrate the breadth of the dictionary in practice.
AI-assisted writing
Text produced with substantive help from a generative AI system, requiring disclosure under most publisher policies.
Lead / equal / supporting qualifier
Modifier appended to a CRediT role to declare relative degree of contribution within that role on a paper.
Narrative CV
Structured-prose researcher biography (Royal Society, UKRI, NIH) replacing publication-list-driven assessment.
Registered report
Two-stage publication where methodology is peer-reviewed and accepted before data collection begins.
ORCID iD
Sixteen-digit researcher identifier resolvable at orcid.org, used to disambiguate authorship across systems.
CERIF
euroCRIS data-model standard for Current Research Information Systems, defining entities for persons, projects, outputs.
Trusted Research Environment
Secure analysis platform where sensitive data is held centrally and researchers bring their code, not the other way around.
Data management plan (DMP)
Living document declaring how research data will be collected, stored, shared, and preserved across the project lifecycle.
Reproducibility
Capacity of an independent party to obtain the same result using the original code, data, and computational environment.
Model card
Structured documentation of an ML model: training data, intended use, performance, limitations, and ethical considerations.
Paper mill
Commercial operation that fabricates manuscripts and authorship slots for sale, a growing integrity threat to journals.
GDPR
EU regulation governing personal-data processing, with extraterritorial reach and direct implications for research data.
NSPM-33
US National Security Presidential Memorandum 33 mandating disclosure of foreign affiliations on federally funded research.
CARE principles
Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics — Indigenous Peoples’ data governance principles, complementing FAIR.
DORA
San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, calling for an end to journal-impact-factor-based evaluation of researchers.
Plan S
cOAlition S mandate requiring immediate open access for publications arising from publicly funded research.
PPI (patient and public involvement)
Research carried out with or by patients and members of the public, not merely about or for them.
LEAF framework
Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework — bronze/silver/gold certification for sustainable laboratory operations.
MTDC
Modified Total Direct Cost — the cost base on which US federal indirect-cost rates are calculated, excluding equipment and subawards above $25k.
Project ID (RAiD-anchored)
Research Activity Identifier (RAiD) handle anchoring a project across funders, institutions, outputs, and contributors.
Featured entries
Selected from v2026.1
A taste of what's inside — definitions, picklists, related terms, structured data, all under CC-BY 4.0.
IACUC Adverse Event and Unanticipated Outcome Plan
An IACUC adverse event and unanticipated outcome plan is the written contingency component of an approved animal-use protocol specifying: (1) trigger criteria for what counts as an adverse event or unanticipated outcome for that study (pain, distress, injury, illness, or a clinical sign exceeding the approved humane endpoints); (2) who is authorized to act immediately, in practice the Attending Veterinarian or delegated veterinary staff, who can order treatment, analgesia, or euthanasia without prior investigator consent when welfare requires it; (3) a defined internal reporting pathway and timeframe from the observer to veterinary staff to the IACUC office; and (4) a documented outcome record distinguishing an isolated clinical event from a pattern indicating the protocol itself needs IACUC-reviewed modification. Institutions holding a PHS Animal Welfare Assurance must additionally report specific categories of event -- serious or continuing noncompliance, serious deviation from the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, or an IACUC-ordered suspension -- to OLAW under PHS Policy IV.F.3.
SPRE (Strategy, People and Research Environment)
SPRE is the REF 2029 assessment element scoring the conditions an institution and its submitting units put in place to enable research, replacing REF 2021's Environment element (REF5a/REF5b). It is worth 20% of the overall REF 2029 quality profile, combining an Institution-Level Statement (ILS, 60% of the SPRE score) and a Unit-Level Statement (ULS, 40%), each covering context/mission/strategy, people, income/infrastructure/facilities, and collaboration/engagement/impact. Guidance is still being finalised through 2026.
TCPS 2 Chapter 7 (Conflicts of Interest)
TCPS 2 (the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans), Chapter 7, "Conflicts of Interest," is the chapter of Canada's tri-agency human-research ethics policy that governs how researchers, research ethics boards (REBs) and institutions identify, disclose and manage conflicts of interest arising in human-participant research. A conflict of interest under Chapter 7 exists whenever a person's or institution's duties toward research participants and the research record could be compromised, or could reasonably appear to be compromised, by a competing personal, financial, professional or institutional interest. The chapter treats real, potential and perceived conflicts as equally disclosable -- a conflict does not need to have actually influenced a decision to trigger Chapter 7's disclosure and management requirements, only to create a reasonable appearance that it might. Chapter 7 applies at three distinct levels: individual conflicts (a researcher's own competing interests), institutional conflicts (the institution's own financial or other stake in a study's outcome), and REB-member conflicts (a board member with a personal or professional stake in a protocol under that board's review).
Data Protection Act 2018, Section 19 (Research Safeguards)
DPA 2018 Section 19 was the UK domestic provision requiring that research/archiving/statistics processing under UK GDPR Article 89(1) not be likely to cause substantial damage or distress, and not be used for decisions about a particular individual unless for approved medical research. It was omitted from 5 February 2026 by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025; the same safeguards now sit in UK GDPR Articles 84B and 84C.
ISO 18626 (Interlibrary Loan Transactions — Application Protocol)
<p><strong>ISO 18626</strong>, <em>Information and documentation — Interlibrary loan transactions</em>, is the international application-protocol standard for the messages that library systems exchange to request, supply, and track resource-sharing loans and copies between institutions. A transaction qualifies as ISO 18626-compliant when it is carried out as a defined sequence of XML messages — a <strong>Request</strong> from the borrowing (requesting) library, and <strong>Supplying Agency</strong> and <strong>Requesting Agency</strong> status/action messages exchanged between the two systems — rather than as free-text email, fax, or a proprietary, non-standard API. First published by ISO in 2014, revised in 2017, and further revised as ISO 18626:2021, the standard is maintained under ISO/TC 46, the technical committee for information and documentation.</p>
NISO Z39.98 (Authoring and Interchange Framework for Adaptive XML Publishing)
ANSI/NISO Z39.98-2012, Authoring and Interchange Framework for Adaptive XML Publishing Specification (commonly called the A&I Framework, or by its DAISY-side identifier Z3998), is a joint NISO/DAISY Consortium standard, published in 2012, that defines a modular framework for building XML markup languages for accessible, adaptive publishing rather than a single fixed document format. A publication workflow is 'Z39.98-conformant' when its source XML is authored against a document model built on the A&I Framework's shared architecture (a common core vocabulary plus resource-type-specific modules for books, periodicals, and other content types), so that a single authored source can be transformed into multiple universally accessible output formats -- braille, large print, synthetic speech/DAISY talking book, and EPUB -- without re-authoring content per format. It supersedes ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005(R2012), the original DAISY Digital Talking Book (DTB) specification, of which it is a substantial, non-backward-compatible redesign -- which is why NISO and the DAISY Consortium issued it under a new standard number rather than as a further DTB revision.
What you can do here
Browse · search · download · cite · contribute
Browse
By domain or letter
All 1242 entries, grouped by their thematic domain or alphabetically. Filter by status and CRIS-readiness.
Learn moreSearch
Full-text + facets
Search definitions, picklists, sample values, and crosswalks. Type-ahead suggestions across all entries.
Learn moreDownload
Six open formats
JSON-LD · CSV · OWL · RDF Turtle · BibTeX · XLSX. Suitable for CRIS ingestion or local vocabulary servers.
Learn moreCite
Citable URIs + DOIs
Every entry has a stable URI. The dictionary itself has a Dataset DOI (assigned per release).
Learn moreRelated areas of CASRAI
Where to go next
The dictionary sits inside a broader stewardship programme. These adjacent surfaces extend the same vocabulary into roles, adoption tracking, crosswalks, governance, and source bibliography.
/credit
CRediT taxonomy
The 14 contributor roles (conceptualization, methodology, software, writing — original draft, etc.) and the canonical role definitions.
/credit/adoption
Publisher CRediT adoption tracker
Which journals and publishers ingest CRediT taxonomy contributor roles, with adoption status and submission-system support.
/federation/cross-walks
Crosswalks
Field-level mappings from CASRAI entries to DataCite, MARC, ORCID, Schema.org, and other vocabularies.
/about/working-groups
Working groups
The 20 stewardship working groups that draft, review, and ratify dictionary entries on a rolling release cadence.
/standards/releases
Release history
Per-release changelog of added, modified, and deprecated entries since the 2026 revival of CASRAI stewardship.
/resources/bibliography
Foundational bibliography
Peer-reviewed and grey-literature sources underpinning the dictionary entries, organised by domain and theme.
About
What the dictionary is
Provenance, governance, scope, and how the dictionary relates to NISO / euroCRIS / CODATA standards.
Contribute
Propose a term
Working groups review proposals during each release cycle. Community contributions get CRediT attribution.
Releases
v2026.1 release notes
Added, modified, and deprecated entries since the previous release. Versioned and citable.
For implementers and citers
Open, machine-readable, freely reusable
CASRAI Dictionary content is published under CC-BY 4.0. Use it in your CRIS, repository, publisher submission system, CRediT-aware editorial workflow, or in your own controlled-vocabulary infrastructure.
Frequently asked
Dictionary FAQ
- What is the CASRAI Dictionary?
The CASRAI Dictionary is a curated, citable, machine-readable controlled vocabulary for research-administration information. v2026.1 contains 1,242 entries spread across 24 thematic domains, each entry with a stable URI, structured picklists, and Schema.org
DefinedTermmarkup. See about the dictionary for scope and provenance.- How is the Dictionary structured?
The Dictionary is partitioned into 24 thematic domains grouped under 5 stewardship tracks: contributorship, identifiers and systems, computational, governance and integrity, and lifecycle and equity. Each domain is stewarded by a community working group that drafts, reviews, and ratifies its entries. Browse the domain map at /dictionary, or jump to /dictionary/browse for the A-Z view.
- Can I propose a new term?
Yes. Working groups review proposals during each release cycle, and community contributions are credited via CRediT-style attribution in the changelog. Open a proposal at /dictionary/contribute; the relevant working group will route it through the review process for the next versioned release.
- Under what licence are the definitions released?
The CASRAI Dictionary is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY 4.0). You may reuse, redistribute, and adapt the content commercially or non-commercially, provided you give appropriate credit. Implementation patterns are documented under /implement.
- How do I cite the Dictionary?
Each Dictionary release is citable as a Dataset with a versioned URI (e.g.
https://casrai.org/dictionary/for v2026.1) and per-entry stable URIs athttps://casrai.org/dictionary/term/<slug>. The cite page provides citation strings in APA, BibTeX, and RIS formats.- Where do the legacy CASRAI terms come from?
CASRAI was founded in 2006 and built an extensive legacy dictionary before the 2020 stewardship handover. The 2026 revival re-imported and re-published the legacy entries under their original domains, retaining provenance metadata. The current 1,242-entry corpus combines legacy holdings with newly drafted entries. See /about/history for the timeline and /dictionary/changelog for per-release migration notes.
- How many terms are in the CASRAI Dictionary?
The CASRAI Dictionary currently contains 1,242 terms in release v2026.1, distributed across 24 thematic domains grouped under 5 stewardship tracks. Each term has a stable URI, structured definition, optional picklists, and Schema.org
DefinedTermmarkup. The next release, v2026.2 in November 2026, expands the corpus with additional sustainability and AI-disclosure entries. See /dictionary/changelog.- Is the CASRAI Dictionary free?
Yes, the CASRAI Dictionary is free to use. It is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY 4.0), with no paywall, no registration, and no API spend for read access. You may reuse, redistribute, translate, and bundle it commercially or non-commercially, provided you give appropriate credit to CASRAI.
- How do I cite a dictionary term?
To cite a dictionary term, use its stable URI at
https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/<slug>together with the dictionary release version. Each term page emits a citation widget producing APA, BibTeX, RIS, and Chicago forms on the fly. To cite the release as a whole, use the Zenodo DOI listed on /dictionary/cite.
