CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: credit taxonomy niso

  • 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?

    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.

    Aspect CASRAI’s original design work NISO’s formal stewardship
    Period 2012 pilot through 2015 launch 2020 work item to present
    Origin event 2012 Wellcome Trust / Harvard University workshop with ICMJE-affiliated biomedical journal editors 2020 NISO work item to register CRediT as an ANSI/NISO standard
    Governing body CASRAI-convened pilot group NISO CRediT Standing Committee
    Formal designation None — informal taxonomy ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022
    Licence Open, community use CC-BY 4.0, per credit.niso.org
    Change authority Original design team NISO Standing Committee via ANSI balloting

    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.

  • 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?

    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.

    Attribute 2014–2020 (CASRAI-led) 2022–present (NISO-governed)
    Formal status Community taxonomy, no accredited standard ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, an American National Standard
    Governing body CASRAI working group NISO CRediT Standing Committee
    Primary site casrai.org/credit credit.niso.org
    Licence Open, publisher-adopted informally CC-BY 4.0, formally published
    Maintenance process Ad hoc working-group revisions Standing committee review cycle

    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.