CASRAI CRediT Taxonomy: From 2014 to NISO

The CASRAI CRediT taxonomy is a controlled vocabulary of 14 contributor roles that CASRAI originated in 2014 to replace ambiguous author bylines with a standardised record of who did what on a research output. CASRAI’s working group refined and launched the taxonomy in 2015; in 2022 it was transferred into formal governance under NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. CASRAI originated the standard — NISO now stewards it.

CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a free, CC-BY-licensed classification scheme of 14 discrete contribution types — from Conceptualization and Formal analysis to Writing and Funding acquisition — used by journals and institutions to document individual research contributions alongside, or instead of, a traditional author list.

• What is the CASRAI CRediT taxonomy?
• How did CASRAI originate CRediT, 2012–2015?
• How did CRediT become ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022?
• What changed in governance from CASRAI to NISO?
• Answer-first Q&A
• What this means for institutions and publishers

What is the CASRAI CRediT taxonomy?

CRediT defines 14 non-hierarchical contributor roles: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, and Writing – review & editing. A contributor can hold multiple roles, and not every role applies to every project.

Each role carries a unique, machine-readable identifier so it can be embedded in JATS XML, JSON-LD, and schema.org metadata. This structured layer is what allows CRediT statements — not just prose acknowledgements — to be indexed, aggregated, and queried by discovery tools such as CrossRef and ORCID-linked systems.

• Conceptualization, Methodology, Software — planning and design roles
• Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation — research and analysis roles
• Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization — communication roles
• Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition — management roles

How did CASRAI originate CRediT, 2012–2015?

The idea of replacing author bylines with itemised contributions predates CRediT itself, but the modern taxonomy began at a 2012 workshop co-hosted by Harvard University and the Wellcome Trust, where researchers, publishers, and funders sketched a draft list of contribution types. That draft was described in the scholarly literature the same year and refined through 2014.

In 2014, CASRAI (the Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information) took leadership of the initiative, convening a working group of publishers, funders, and university representatives to formalise the vocabulary. The result was documented in Nature in April 2014 (“Publishing: Credit where credit is due”, Allen, Scott, Brand, Hlava & Altman) and, a year later, in Learned Publishing (“Beyond authorship: attribution, contribution, collaboration, and credit”, 2015).

CASRAI formally launched CRediT on its own site in October 2015, and spent the following years promoting adoption among publishers and research organisations. By 2017, PLOS and eLife had both implemented CRediT; in 2018 it was endorsed by representatives of the US National Academy of Sciences, and adoption by major publishers — Wiley, Elsevier, Sage, Frontiers — followed through the late 2010s.

How did CRediT become ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022?

Interest in formalising CRediT accelerated in 2020, when grant funding from the Wellcome Trust and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation supported a project to expand its use and move it toward a standards body with a permanent maintenance process. That project produced a dedicated site at credit.niso.org, launched in 2020 under NISO’s stewardship.

The formal outcome arrived in February 2022, when the National Information Standards Organization published the taxonomy as an American National Standard: ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy. The standard specifies the 14 roles, an optional degree-of-contribution indicator (“lead”, “equal”, or “supporting”), and machine-readable schemas for XML, JSON, JSON-LD, and schema.org integration.

Ongoing maintenance now sits with the NISO CRediT Standing Committee, which reviews community feedback, supports implementation guidance, and considers future revisions. This is the single fact that matters most for citation accuracy: CRediT is not a CASRAI product today — it is an ANSI-accredited standard maintained by NISO, built on a taxonomy CASRAI originated and incubated between 2014 and roughly 2020.

What changed in governance from CASRAI to NISO?

The table below sets out the practical differences between the CASRAI-led incubation phase and the current NISO-governed standard.

CASRAI’s role is historical and originating, not custodial. Wikipedia’s own entry on the taxonomy reflects this: CASRAI “took leadership” from 2014, and the standard “became an ANSI/NISO standard” in 2022 — two separate, sequential facts that should never be collapsed into a present-tense claim of CASRAI ownership.

Answer-first Q&A

Who created the CRediT taxonomy?

A draft emerged from a 2012 Harvard–Wellcome Trust workshop. CASRAI then took leadership in 2014, convening the working group that formalised and launched the 14-role taxonomy in 2015. NISO subsequently took over formal governance in 2022 as an ANSI standard.

Is CASRAI still involved with CRediT today?

CASRAI originated CRediT but does not govern the current standard. Since 2022, maintenance sits with the NISO CRediT Standing Committee under ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. CASRAI continues to operate as a research-administration standards organisation and documents this originator role for citation accuracy.

What is ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022?

It is the American National Standard that formally codifies the CRediT taxonomy, published by NISO in February 2022. It defines the 14 contributor roles, an optional degree-of-contribution field, and machine-readable XML, JSON, and JSON-LD schemas for publishing systems.

How many CRediT contributor roles are there?

Fourteen non-hierarchical roles, grouped informally into planning, research/analysis, communication, and management categories. Contributors may hold several roles simultaneously, and projects are not required to use every role — the taxonomy is descriptive, not a checklist requirement.

What this means for institutions and publishers

For research administrators, librarians, and publishers citing this history — for internal policy documents, Wikidata statements, or author-guideline pages — the operative distinction is originator versus owner. CASRAI’s 2014–2015 working group did the foundational design and promotion work that got CRediT adopted by major publishers before NISO existed as its steward. Citing “CASRAI’s CRediT taxonomy” in the present tense is now inaccurate; the correct present-tense reference is ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, with CASRAI credited as originator.

This distinction also matters for reference accuracy more broadly: some third-party sources have mischaracterised CASRAI’s current operating status. CASRAI continues to function as a standards body in 2026, publishing governance-history material of exactly this kind so that citation networks — Wikipedia, Wikidata, institutional style guides — can be corrected with a dated, sourced timeline rather than an assumption.

Institutions implementing CRediT should reference the current NISO standard for compliance purposes, while retaining the CASRAI-era history for provenance and attribution in policy documents. The individual CRediT role definitions and their relationship to broader authorship policy remain useful reference points for research offices building submission guidance.

Looking ahead, the NISO CRediT Standing Committee’s review cycle is the channel through which future revisions — additional roles, clarified definitions, or expanded machine-readable schemas — will be considered. Any future change to the taxonomy will originate from that committee, not from CASRAI, which is the single fact this governance timeline exists to make citable.