CRediT Taxonomy Under NISO: Inside Z39.104-2022

The CRediT taxonomy is governed today by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), not by the group that originally designed it. Formal stewardship sits with the credit taxonomy niso standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, whose maintenance runs through a NISO CRediT Standing Committee that reviews proposed changes and coordinates revisions to the published standard.

ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 is the American National Standard that formalises the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) — a controlled vocabulary of 14 contributor roles used by scholarly journals to describe individual research contributions, approved by ANSI on 14 January 2022 and published by NISO on 8 February 2022.

CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. Understanding where CASRAI’s design work ends and NISO’s formal governance begins matters for any publisher, institution, or developer deciding how to submit a correction, propose a new role, or cite the standard accurately.

• Who stewards the CRediT taxonomy today?
• How is the Z39.104 working group structured?
• What is the revision cadence for the standard?
• How do publishers submit change requests?
• Common questions about CRediT taxonomy governance

Who stewards the CRediT taxonomy today?

NISO stewards the CRediT taxonomy through ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, a standard approved by the American National Standards Institute and published by NISO. Stewardship is distinct from origination: CASRAI and a cross-institutional pilot group designed the original taxonomy, but formal, ongoing governance now belongs to NISO’s standards infrastructure.

This distinction is not a technicality. It determines who has authority to add, deprecate, or clarify a contributor role, and it is why publishers citing the standard should reference ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 rather than an unversioned “CRediT taxonomy” with no governing body attached.

How is the Z39.104 working group structured?

The NISO working group that produced Z39.104-2022 was deliberately cross-sector, drawing named representatives from publishers, funders, universities, and research-consulting firms rather than a single stakeholder type. That composition is itself a governance signal: no one sector controls the standard.

Publicly listed contributors to the NISO work item included representatives from PLOS, Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis Group, IOP Publishing, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Northwestern University, Université de Montréal, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Mathematical Association of America, alongside independent research consultants.

• Publishers — PLOS, Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis, IOP Publishing, the Mathematical Association of America
• Funders — UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
• Universities — Northwestern University, Université de Montréal, Carnegie Mellon University
• Independent consultants — Research Consulting Limited and Kerridge Research Consulting

Once ANSI approval completed in January 2022, this working group’s role transitioned into the standing NISO CRediT Standing Committee, which now provides the ongoing forum for feedback, implementation support, and future expansion of the taxonomy into subject areas beyond its original biomedical-publishing roots.

What is the revision cadence for the standard?

ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 does not operate on a fixed annual revision schedule. Instead, it follows NISO’s continuous-maintenance model: proposed changes can be submitted at any time, but they are only incorporated into a new dated version of the standard after the Standing Committee reviews them and, where warranted, NISO runs the change through formal ANSI balloting.

Three dates anchor the standard’s history so far:

• 2020 — NISO launches the work item to formalise CRediT as an ANSI/NISO standard, with a small working group focused on the existing 14 roles.
• 14 January 2022 — ANSI approves the standard.
• 8 February 2022 — NISO publishes ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022.

No subsequent dated revision has been published since 2022; proposed extensions — such as recognising acknowledged (non-authorship) contributions or peer-review credit — are discussed through the Standing Committee and the associated CRediT Community of Interest before any future ballot.

How do publishers submit change requests?

Publishers, institutions, and individual researchers can raise a proposed change to the taxonomy at any time; the request is then triaged by the NISO CRediT Standing Committee rather than acted on unilaterally by any single publisher.

1. Draft the request in writing, specifying the exact role, definition, or scope change proposed and the use case it addresses.
2. Route it to NISO for referral to the Standing Committee, including your name, affiliation, and contact details.
3. Await committee review — the Standing Committee discusses submissions as part of its regular meetings and decides whether to advance them.
4. Formal balloting — if the committee approves a substantive change, NISO carries it through ANSI’s standards-approval process before it appears in a revised, dated version of Z39.104.

This is why individual publishers — Sage among them — note on their own author-guidance pages that not every journal has adopted CRediT yet, and direct queries to dedicated editorial mailboxes rather than to NISO directly: implementation decisions sit with each publisher, while the taxonomy itself sits with NISO.

For institutions building internal guidance, CASRAI’s CRediT contributor roles hub and the individual CRediT role pages summarise the 14 roles for practical reference, alongside broader context in CASRAI’s authorship resources.

Common questions about CRediT taxonomy governance

What is the CRediT taxonomy?

CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a controlled vocabulary of 14 contributor roles used to describe the specific contributions individuals make to a research output, distinct from a simple author byline. It has been in widespread scholarly-publishing use since 2015 and was formalised as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 in 2022.

What are the 14 roles of CRediT taxonomy?

The 14 roles are Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, and Writing – review & editing. Each role can be attributed to more than one contributor, and each contributor can hold more than one role.

Does every publisher use the same CRediT taxonomy?

No. The taxonomy itself is standardised under ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, but adoption is uneven: some journals, including certain Sage titles, have not yet implemented CRediT statements at all. Standardisation of the vocabulary does not guarantee uniform implementation across every journal or publisher.

The practical implication for research administrators is that citing “the CRediT taxonomy” without a version reference is no longer precise enough for policy documents, institutional repositories, or funder-reporting templates. ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 is the citable, versioned artefact; CASRAI’s 2014 design work is the historical origin, not the current governing document. As the Standing Committee’s remit expands toward acknowledged contributions and peer-review credit, expect the next dated revision to widen the taxonomy’s scope beyond its original 14 roles rather than replace them.