Baltimore, MD – February 08, 2022 – 

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) today announces its publication of the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) as an ANSI/NISO standard, Z39.104-2022. The taxonomy, which was originally developed in 2014, describes 14 roles that represent the typical range of contributors to scientific scholarly outputs, and that can be used to enable recognition and facilitate transparency to the myriad contributions to research in our increasingly networked scholarly ecosystem. CRediT is already in use by more than 50 organizations, a majority of which are scholarly publishers, collectively representing thousands of journals.

The process of formal standardization with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) included the convening of a NISO Working Group for CRediT that ensured clarity in the existing taxonomy language and the implementation instructions for academics and publishers. The updated taxonomy was approved by NISO Voting Members in 2021, and ANSI has now approved it for publication as a standard. Simultaneous with the standardization process, the CRediT website at http://159.203.176.220 was launched, to provide a stable home for the identifiers and a central resource for interested parties.

NISO now plans to establish a Standing Committee to support CRediT. This Committee will continue current education and outreach efforts and work with the community to determine how to keep the taxonomy up-to-date and relevant; for example, ensuring continued roll out and adoption among publishers, and exploring how to expand its value to all research disciplinary areas. A Community of Interest Group will also be established, to enable participation of a broad and diverse range of community perspectives and interests, and to inform any future developments of the taxonomy. 

“We are pleased and grateful to have had such support from the NISO community in making CRediT an ANSI/NISO standard,” commented Liz Allen, Director of Strategic Initiatives at F1000 and co-chair of the CRediT Working Group. “Voting members provided many thoughtful and valuable comments along with their votes approving the draft standard. These practical suggestions represent early feedback for the new Standing Committee to consider, and will help us steward future work to maximize CRediT’s adoption by all members of the scholarly community.”

“Many thanks and kudos to the members of the CRediT Working Group for their work to formalize the Contributor Roles Taxonomy as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022,” commented Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of NISO. “Improved momentum for adoption of the CRediT taxonomy will, in turn, enable more widespread, appropriate, and transparent acknowledgement of contributions. NISO looks forward to supporting the Standing Committee, once it is formed, to ensure the further development of CRediT to effectively support priorities in our community.”

The Contributor Roles Taxonomy is freely available at: https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/credit

About NISO

Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org. 

About CRediT

CRediT (the Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a high-level taxonomy, including 14 roles, that can be used to represent the roles typically played by contributors to scientific scholarly output. The roles describe each contributor’s specific contribution to the scholarly output. For more information, visit the CRediT website (http://159.203.176.220).

Stay in touch with what’s happening with NISO and in the broader information community.

Funds support two-year engagement campaign

The CRediT Steering Committee are delighted to announce that the CRediT project has been awarded generous grant funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Wellcome.  The funds are committed over a two-year period and will be used to continue to support implementations of the taxonomy across scholarly publishers, and within the scholarly research ecosystem more broadly. 

These funds are invaluable as CRediT formalizes its affiliation with the National Information Standards Organisation (NISO[1]) and works to develop a coordinated programme of outreach and engagement. In the coming year, work will focus on building out the resource and materials to support adoption and implementation of CRediT, particularly through the new website hosted by NISO, and working with NISO to set up and direct a CRediT Interest Group (CIG) to support regular engagement, capture feedback, and consider future developments of the standard to keep it useful, current and to ensure that it supports the full spectrum of research disciplines.  

Simon Kerridge, Director of Research Policy and Support at the University of Kent, and CRediT co-Chair commented, “We are so pleased that funding agencies like the Sloan Foundation and Wellcome view projects like CRedIT as important pieces of the research infrastructure that need support. Interest in CRediT continues to increase, and to be awarded funds at this time makes a real difference to the speed with which we can help CRediT to grow and be used to best effect.”

Josh Greenberg, Director of Digital Technology Program at the Sloan Foundation said, “The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is pleased to help support the CRediT project’s movement into this phase of broader implementation and adoption. The Foundation’s Scholarly Communication program was founded on the premise that a broader array of signals was necessary to improve the discovery and review of diverse scholarly materials, and more granular precision about the various roles in the research enterprise is essential both to create incentives and reward structures for different contributions as well as to improve assessments of where to direct attention and trust.”

Dr Georgina Humphreys of the Open Research Programme at Wellcome notes,“We are pleased to support CRediT as a system to enable recognition for all members of research teams and an infrastructure to enable a shift in research culture and open practices.”

ABOUT THE ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a not-for-profit, mission-driven grantmaking institution dedicated to improving the welfare of all through the advancement of scientific knowledge. Established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-President and Chief Executive Officer of the General Motors Corporation, the Foundation makes grants in four broad areas: direct support of research in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics; initiatives to increase the quality and diversity of scientific institutions and the science workforce; projects to develop or leverage technology to empower research; and efforts to enhance and deepen public engagement with science and scientists. sloan.org  | @SloanFoundation

ABOUT WELLCOME

Wellcome exists to improve health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive. Wellcome is a global charitable foundation, both politically and financially independent. Wellcome supports scientists and researchers, take on big problems, fuel imaginations and spark debate. For more about Wellcome’s open research initiatives see https://wellcome.org/what-we-do/our-work/open-research and contact:   openresearch@wellcome.org

[1] http://159.203.176.220/

Baltimore, MD – July 23, 2020 – Following their April 2020 announcement, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) Steering Committee have now achieved two more important milestones in their work to formalize and develop CRediT both as a NISO/ANSI standard and as a community. 

In short time, NISO and the CRediT Steering Committee collaborated to establish a small initial working group, which expects to complete editorial changes to the taxonomy language and submit the draft for final approval in September. In addition, they have launched a new, information-rich website http://159.203.176.220, to replace the prior version, which has now been sunset. And, to help further engage the community, a CRediT Twitter account has also been created — @contributor_roles.

“With NISO’s strong support and adept project management, our team has been able to accelerate the pace of our work to share CRediT with the community – to make it as usable and useful as possible,” commented Liz Allen, Director of Strategic Initiatives at F1000, one of the Taxonomy’s originators, and current Steering Committee member. “We look forward to full standardization, wider adoption, and continued interest, feedback, and support from both NISO and the broader community of integrators and adopters.”

“It is a pleasure to support CRediT,” commented Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of NISO. “There is real, palpable momentum centered around the taxonomy, and we are thrilled to be helping secure its foundation and support its scale-up, as transparency into contributions has many benefits for the scholarly information ecosystem.”

Visit the new website to learn more about this collaboration. Please note that any links in current adopter and integrator instructions for authors, and other reference documentation, should be updated so that they point to the taxonomy’s new home.

About CRediT

CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a high-level taxonomy, including 14 roles, that can be used to represent the roles typically played by contributors to scientific scholarly output. The roles describe each contributor’s specific contribution to the scholarly output.

About NISO

NISO, based in Baltimore, Maryland, aims to build knowledge, foster discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information standards, and is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org.