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Stewarding ex-CASRAI Assets for the Future: Joint Statement from CODATA, euroCRIS and NISO

Stewarding ex-CASRAI Assets for the Future

March 2022

CODATA,  euroCRIS, and NISO are pleased to confirm arrangements for the future of selected key resources from the former CASRAI organisation.  CASRAI as an organisation has ceased to exist.  Before the organisation was closed down, CODATA, euroCRIS, and NISO were each approached to steward selected CASRAI resources of value to the research data, research information and information standards communities.

We thank all the volunteers internationally who worked on CASRAI to make such important contributions to our fields, and are honoured to continue the stewardship and development of these valuable resources. 

CODATA is taking responsibility for the CASRAI Research Data Management Glossary, which will now be known as the Research Data Management Terminology.  The Research Data Management Terminology is intended as a practical reference for individuals and groups concerned with the practice and improvement of research data management.  The Terminology is being actively reviewed and improved through a voluntary Working Group of experts from the global RDM community.  For more information, see https://codata.org/initiatives/data-science-and-stewardship/casrai-rdm-terminology/ 

euroCRIS is taking over the management and curation of the CASRAI Catalogue of Elements. The catalogue is the result of a joint effort of business owners that semantically described elements related to research and education, and placed them in a relational context. The original CASRAI Catalogue of Elements will be managed in a Github repository and the content will be used to enrich the CERIF format, the Common European Research Information Format used for exchanging research information in a semantically interoperable manner, stored in research information systems. For more information see: https://eurocris.org/casrai-domain-handover. 

NISO has taken over management of the CASRAI Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) and has published the terminology as a formal ANSI/NISO standard. The work to formalise CRediT was launched in 2020, focusing first on the initial 14 contributor roles in the existing CRediT taxonomy.  Now that the formal approval process has been completed and the official standard has been published, a NISO CRediT Standing Committee will be set up to provide a forum for discussion and community feedback, support further implementations and use cases for CRediT, and to consider how CRediT can be further developed and expanded to support contributions in a wider range of subject areas. The taxonomy remains freely available for community use.  For more information, please visit: https://credit.niso.org/ 

The CASRAI website continues to be available at https://casrai.org/, but will finally close on 23 June 2022.  We look forward to welcoming colleagues to use and contribute to the Research Data Management Terminology, the Catalogue of Elements and the CRediT taxonomy at their new locations.  The three organisations have agreed to collaborate to ensure good communication and any necessary alignment at the points where the three resources connect.

For more information, please contact the respective organisations for each resource.