CRediT Working Group Begins Work Towards Formalization of ANSI/NISO Standard

April 23, 2020 - Following its December 2019 announcement, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is pleased to announce the formal launch of its work to formalize and develop the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) as an ANSI/NISO standard. NISO Voting Members expressed strong support for this work, which has also been welcomed by the wider community.
 
Work will focus first on formalizing the 14 contributor roles in the existing CRediT taxonomy, through a small Working Group led by the current CRediT Chairs, Liz Allen of F1000Research, Simon Kerridge, of the University of Kent, and Alison McGonagle-O’Connell of O’Connell Consulting. Once the Working Group’s proposed CRediT standard has completed the ANSI/NISO approval process, a NISO CRediT Standing Committee will be set up. This will provide a forum for discussion and community feedback, support further implementations and use cases for CRediT, and — most importantly — to look forward and consider how CRediT can be developed and potentially expanded, for example to reflect a wider range of contributions to research and to support disciplinary (beyond its initial STM focus) and subject areas.  

Calls for feedback on the initial CRediT standard, and for participation in the Standing Committee, will be issued later this year.

Liz Allen notes, “There has been overwhelming support from the broad range of stakeholders across the research community for the creation of the contributor roles taxonomy, with its aim to improve transparency and discoverability of the myriad of contributions to research. We hope that this formalization will better support existing users and implementers in scholarly workflows, as well as ultimately enabling its development to benefit the wider research community.”

Alison McGonagle-O’Connell agrees, “The aim is to make the Contributor Roles Taxonomy practical and useful, avoid its misuse, and, most importantly, ensure rigor in the process for how the CRediT standard can best evolve to support the research community at large.”

“We are looking forward to working with the CRediT Working Group and the wider community to develop this important taxonomy as a standard,” says Nettie Lagace, Associate Executive Director of NISO. “We are delighted that there is already such keen interest in the taxonomy from NISO members and non-members alike, and are confident that the formalization — and, in future, expansion — of the CRediT contributor roles, will enable the taxonomy to be widely adopted and implemented.”

About NISO

NISO, based in Baltimore, Maryland, fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. 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. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://.niso.org).