Frequently asked questions
What is SigmaCV?
SigmaCV is open infrastructure for responsible research assessment. It auto-generates clean, customizable academic CVs from open research data and keeps them in sync with the open record — you curate what shows, choose the style, and export to PDF, DOCX, LaTeX or Markdown.
Is it free?
Yes. SigmaCV is free for individuals and open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. You can self-host it or use the hosted instance at no cost.
Where does the data come from?
From open research data sources, read as public metadata only: OpenAlex for publications and metrics, ORCID for your verified identity, Crossref and DataCite for metadata, OpenAIRE for datasets and software, DBLP for conference papers, and Open Editors Plus for editorial roles. Grants also come from Crossref and the UKRI, NIH and NSF funder databases, and clinical trials from ClinicalTrials.gov — these registry matches are by name and organization, so you confirm them. Your public page can also link your Wikidata identity.
Where does my CV data come from?
SigmaCV assembles your CV from open scholarly sources: your publications, metrics and grants from OpenAlex; your identity plus positions, education, funding, peer-review and service from your ORCID record; bibliographic gap-fill from Crossref; institutions canonicalised via ROR; datasets & software from DataCite; and editorial roles from Open Editors Plus. You stay in control — curate, mark works “not mine”, or add a work by DOI; nothing is invented, and you choose what's shown.
How do you know which publications are mine?
Your work is matched by identifier — your ORCID iD or OpenAlex author ID — never by name string, which avoids the name-collision errors that plague name-based matching. You then curate the list, marking anything wrongly attributed as “not mine”.
Will citation metrics or the Impact Factor be shown?
No metrics are shown by default. Metrics are opt-in and you choose them; we prefer field-normalized indicators over raw counts, and we never display a journal's Impact Factor on your CV.
How is my privacy protected, and can I export or delete my data?
SigmaCV reads only public research metadata, asks for per-field consent before anything is published, and never logs your curation choices for research without your explicit consent. You can export your data and delete your account at any time.
Can an institution, funder or recruiter ask me for a CV in a specific format?
Yes, and they need no account. A request is just a link to your editor of the form https://sigmacv.org/cv?freeze=<model>&preset=reader — <model> is a CV model's id or its exact name (the Versions panel lists every model as “name (id)”; for example erc, tenure-us, institutional-assessment or pharma-rd; use 1 for your current layout), preset is reader (assessor evidence marks on) or hiring (contact details on, academic marks off), and label= and by=YYYY-MM-DD are optional. When you open the link, SigmaCV shows exactly what it asks for and lets you freeze a version in that shape with one click. Nothing is sent to the requester and the request is never stored: you send the frozen link yourself.
Why is one of my editorial roles missing or out of date?
Editorial roles are the one part of your CV that is not read live. They come from Open Editors Plus, a dataset collected from journals' own websites around April 2026 and replaced about once a year. A role you took up after that arrives with the next edition, and one that has ended stays listed until then. A role can also be missing for two other reasons. Roles are attached to you by an identifier, never by your name alone: when a journal prints no ORCID iD for its editors, the role either comes as a suggestion, hidden until you confirm it, or cannot be attached to you at all. And a journal the dataset does not cover is not there. In every case you can add the role yourself in the editor, and hide one that no longer applies.