Opinion: grant reporting should require structured credit taxonomy authorship data alongside biosketches and final reports. Funders currently reward the named author list, not the research team that actually produced the work — and the CRediT roles already used by publishers are the readiest tool to fix that gap. This is a CASRAI perspective, not a report of confirmed funder policy: no major funder currently mandates it.
The Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) is a standardised set of 14 roles — from conceptualisation and data curation to funding acquisition and writing — used to describe who did what on a research output, distinct from the narrower question of who qualifies as an “author”. CASRAI originated CRediT in 2014; the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and it is licensed CC-BY 4.0 for free reuse by anyone, including funders.
What is the CRediT taxonomy, and why does grant reporting ignore it?
CRediT is not an authorship test. It does not decide who qualifies as an author under criteria such as those set out by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE); it describes contribution type once a research output exists. Publishers including Elsevier, Wiley and Taylor & Francis now require a CRediT statement at submission, mapping each named author to one or more of the 14 roles.
Grant reporting sits entirely outside this system. A funder’s final report typically lists a principal investigator, co-investigators, and a project narrative — not a structured breakdown of who curated the data, who wrote the software, or who administered the project day to day. That gap matters because grant reports, not journal articles, are where funders form their view of “who delivered this award”.
The case for funder-required credit taxonomy authorship data
Three arguments support requiring CRediT-style data in grant reporting, not just at publication.
- Credit for non-PI staff. Research software engineers, data managers, and postdoctoral researchers frequently deliver the technical core of a funded project without ever becoming a named co-investigator on the award. A contributor-role field in the final report creates an auditable record of that work, independent of authorship politics on any resulting paper.
- Better evidence for funders’ own decisions. Funders assess renewal applications, track record, and “who can actually deliver” partly from CVs and biosketches. A structured role history — built cumulatively across a researcher’s funded outputs — is a more reliable signal than author position, which varies wildly by discipline and negotiation.
- Continuity with ORCID. ORCID has supported CRediT role tagging on individual “Works” records since 2019. Extending the same structured field to the grant-reporting stage would let a researcher’s contributor history accumulate consistently across both outputs and awards, rather than resetting at each reporting boundary.
None of this requires funders to redefine authorship. It only requires them to capture, at the reporting stage, data that publishers already collect at the publication stage.
The administrative-burden counter-argument
The strongest objection is not conceptual, it is operational. Grant reporting is already a compliance burden for research offices, and adding another structured field is not free.
- Duplication risk. If contributor roles are recorded once at reporting and again at publication, teams will re-key the same information twice unless the two systems are linked via ORCID or a shared identifier.
- Multi-institutional friction. Large consortium awards, common in Horizon Europe and UKRI-funded collaborations, involve dozens of contributors across institutions with different research-information systems; agreeing roles before a report deadline adds negotiation overhead.
- Taxonomy fit. The 14 CRediT roles were designed for journal-article contributions. Some categories of grant-funded work — public engagement, infrastructure maintenance, cohort recruitment — map awkwardly onto the existing role list without local adaptation.
These are real costs, not reasons to abandon the idea. They are reasons to pilot it narrowly and design the reporting field so it can be pre-populated from existing ORCID or publication CRediT data rather than entered from scratch.
How grant reporting compares with today’s publisher practice
The asymmetry between publication-stage and award-stage contributorship data is the core of the argument. It also happens to be an information gap most coverage of CRediT does not spell out.
| Stage / stakeholder | Structured contributor-role data required today? | Mechanism, where it exists |
|---|---|---|
| Major journal publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis) | Yes, at submission | CRediT author statement mapping each author to one or more of 14 roles |
| Grant final/interim reports (typical funder templates) | No | Narrative project summary and named investigator list only |
| NIH biosketch | No structured field | Free-text “Contributions to Science” section |
| ORCID “Works” record | Optional, researcher-populated | CRediT role tags supported since 2019 |
| This proposal (CASRAI perspective) | Argued position, not existing policy | A CRediT-derived contributor-role block appended to funder reports, pre-populated from ORCID where possible |
Answer-first questions on CRediT and author contributions
What is funding acquisition in author contribution?
Funding acquisition is one of CRediT’s 14 defined roles, covering acquisition of the financial support for the project that led to the published output. It is the single CRediT role most directly relevant to grant reporting, since it explicitly separates the person who secured the award from those who executed the research — a distinction current biosketch narratives rarely make clean.
What are the criteria for author contribution?
Under ICMJE criteria, authorship requires substantial contribution to the work’s conception or design (or data acquisition, analysis, or interpretation), drafting or critically revising the manuscript, final approval of the published version, and agreement to be accountable for it. CRediT does not replace these criteria; it sits alongside them to describe contribution type once authorship has already been determined.
What are examples of author contributions?
Typical CRediT-defined contributions include conceptualisation, data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project administration, software, supervision, validation, visualisation, and the two writing roles — original draft, and review and editing. A single individual can hold several roles on one output.
Implications for funders and institutions
If funders moved toward requesting credit taxonomy authorship data in grant reports, research offices would need three things before a mandate could work in practice: an ORCID-linked pre-population mechanism to avoid double entry, a pilot cohort limited to a small number of funding calls, and explicit guidance that CRediT roles describe contribution, not authorship eligibility, so institutions do not over-interpret the data during promotion or tenure review.
The honest case for funder adoption is incremental, not sweeping: pilot it on a subset of awards, link it to ORCID so it is populated once and reused, and treat early results as evidence rather than assuming the benefit before it is tested. Given that publishers already run this system at scale, the marginal cost of extending it one stage earlier, into grant reporting, is smaller than building a comparable structure from nothing.
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