CIÊNCIAVITAE is Portugal’s national platform for a standardized researcher curriculum vitae, developed and managed by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia), Portugal’s national science-funding agency. For a research administrator working with Portuguese institutions, funders, or collaborators, CIÊNCIAVITAE functions as the closest Portuguese equivalent to a national CRIS-plus-CV system: a single record where a researcher’s degrees, positions, publications, and projects live, tied to national funding processes and cross-linked to ORCID. This guide explains what CIÊNCIAVITAE is, who governs it, how it factors into Portuguese national funding applications and evaluation, and how it interoperates with ORCID.
What CIÊNCIAVITAE is
CIÊNCIAVITAE (hosted at cienciavitae.pt) is described by FCT as a unique, personalized, harmonized, and structured curriculum vitae for anyone, Portuguese or foreign, working in the academic and research context in Portugal — students, researchers, and institutions alike. Rather than each researcher maintaining separate CVs for different funders, institutions, and evaluation exercises, CIÊNCIAVITAE consolidates that information into one platform, drawing together data previously scattered across several distinct Portuguese systems.
FCT built CIÊNCIAVITAE on the technical base of an earlier platform, DeGóis, in conjunction with a regulatory and technical framework called PTCRIS (the Portuguese Current Research Information System initiative). The stated aim, per FCT’s own framing, is to support a “more science, less bureaucracy” approach to administrative simplification, in line with European open-science strategy — reducing the duplicate data entry researchers would otherwise face across national funding, evaluation, and institutional-reporting systems.
Governance: FCT and the PTCRIS framework
CIÊNCIAVITAE is owned and operated by FCT, the Portuguese public agency responsible for national research funding, science and technology policy, and the country’s participation in European research programmes. It is not a third-party or commercial CRIS product; it is government-run national research infrastructure, comparable in function — though not in ownership model — to Brazil’s Lattes Platform, which CNPq (Brazil’s federal science-funding council) similarly operates as a national researcher-CV system tied to funding processes.
CIÊNCIAVITAE sits inside PTCRIS, FCT’s broader technical and regulatory framework for interconnecting researchers, organizations, research outputs, projects, and funding through persistent identifiers. That framework is also the basis for Ciência ID (see below) and for FCT’s collaboration protocols with other national bodies — including A3ES (the higher-education accreditation agency), ANI (the national innovation agency), DGEEC and DGES (education-statistics and higher-education directorates), and the COMPETE 2020 operational programme — to standardize how researcher and institutional data move between Portugal’s science and higher-education systems.
Ciência ID: the underlying identifier
Underpinning CIÊNCIAVITAE is Ciência ID, described by FCT as a unique identifier issued to each researcher that doubles as an authentication mechanism. Ciência ID is what lets a researcher’s information be aggregated once and then reused across the connected Portuguese systems (funding applications, institutional reporting, evaluation exercises) rather than re-entered separately for each one. In that sense Ciência ID functions, within the Portuguese national ecosystem specifically, similarly to how an ORCID iD functions internationally — a persistent identifier that a researcher registers once and then authorizes connected systems to read from.
Role in Portuguese national funding applications and evaluation
CIÊNCIAVITAE was rolled out in phases: initially optional, then progressively required. Per FCT’s own published guidance, CIÊNCIAVITAE became mandatory for FCT calls from summer 2019 onward — meaning applicants to FCT-funded calls (research grants, PhD and postdoctoral studentships, and related funding instruments) are expected to submit their curriculum via CIÊNCIAVITAE rather than a free-form CV. FCT’s own application guides for specific calls (for example, its PhD studentship calls) reference CIÊNCIAVITAE directly as the required CV format. Research administrators supporting Portuguese applicants, or international collaborators named on an FCT-funded proposal, should treat a current, complete CIÊNCIAVITAE record as a prerequisite for participation rather than an optional add-on.
Because CIÊNCIAVITAE also feeds institutional and national reporting through its collaboration protocols with A3ES, ANI, and the other bodies named above, it functions in Portugal’s research-evaluation landscape somewhat the way a national CRIS (current research information system) does elsewhere: a single authoritative source that downstream evaluation and reporting processes draw from, rather than each process collecting the same researcher data independently.
Interoperability with ORCID
CIÊNCIAVITAE is integrated with ORCID as one of several connected national and international systems (alongside FCT-SIG CV, DeGóis, RENATES, REBIDES, and RCAAP — see below). A researcher can associate their ORCID iD with their CIÊNCIAVITAE record and use a data-synchronization tool to keep the “Productions” (publications and other outputs) and “Projects” areas of the two records aligned, so that information entered in one system doesn’t have to be duplicated by hand in the other.
FCT was an early ORCID adopter, joining as an ORCID member organization in 2013, and has continued to position CIÊNCIAVITAE and Ciência ID within FCT’s wider national persistent-identifier (PID) strategy under PTCRIS — using ORCID for the internationally interoperable researcher identifier layer while CIÊNCIAVITAE and Ciência ID handle the Portugal-specific CV and funding-process layer. Portugal’s ORCID adoption has been highlighted publicly by ORCID itself as a notable national PID strategy; specific adoption-rate and time-saving figures cited in that context are ORCID’s own reported statistics rather than FCT-published figures, and CASRAI has not independently verified them, so they are not restated here as fact. Research administrators should treat the CIÊNCIAVITAE–ORCID relationship as complementary rather than duplicative: ORCID remains the cross-publisher, cross-funder, cross-border identifier a researcher carries for life; CIÊNCIAVITAE and Ciência ID are the Portugal-specific layer tied to national funding and evaluation processes, kept in sync with ORCID where the researcher opts in.
Predecessor and related Portuguese systems
CIÊNCIAVITAE did not appear in isolation — it consolidates and, in most cases, replaces several earlier or parallel Portuguese systems:
- DeGóis — the earlier FCT curriculum-vitae platform that CIÊNCIAVITAE was built on and has largely superseded.
- FCT-SIG CV — FCT’s internal grant-management CV module, one of the sources CIÊNCIAVITAE consolidates.
- RENATES — the national registry of research and technical-support staff (Registo Nacional de Técnicos e Investigadores, per FCT’s naming).
- REBIDES — a related national register in the same institutional-data family.
- RCAAP (Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal) — Portugal’s open-access repository aggregator, which CIÊNCIAVITAE draws on for publication data.
Consolidating these into one platform is the practical expression of the “one record, reused everywhere” principle behind PTCRIS and behind persistent-identifier infrastructure generally — the same principle that underlies ORCID’s own “enter once, reuse often” positioning internationally.
Who uses CIÊNCIAVITAE
CIÊNCIAVITAE is aimed at anyone operating in the Portuguese academic and research context, regardless of nationality: students, doctoral candidates, postdoctoral researchers, faculty, and research-performing institutions themselves. Institutions use the platform’s data-extraction tools to pull structured researcher data into their own reporting and evaluation workflows, rather than collecting CVs manually. For international collaborators joining an FCT-funded project or a Portuguese institution, registering a CIÊNCIAVITAE record (via Ciência ID) is generally a practical necessity rather than optional, given how deeply the platform is woven into FCT’s funding and reporting processes.
Frequently asked questions
Is CIÊNCIAVITAE the same thing as ORCID?
No. They are complementary, not interchangeable. ORCID is an international, cross-publisher, cross-funder persistent identifier that a researcher keeps for their entire career, independent of any one country or institution. CIÊNCIAVITAE is a Portugal-specific national platform, governed by FCT, tied to Portuguese funding calls and institutional reporting, and identified internally by Ciência ID. The two are designed to interoperate — a researcher can sync their ORCID record with CIÊNCIAVITAE — but CIÊNCIAVITAE does not replace the need for an ORCID iD, and ORCID does not replace the CIÊNCIAVITAE record FCT requires for its own calls.
Is CIÊNCIAVITAE mandatory?
For FCT-funded calls, yes, in practice: per FCT’s own guidance, CIÊNCIAVITAE became mandatory for FCT calls from summer 2019 onward, following an earlier phase where use was optional. Requirements outside FCT’s own calls (at individual institutions, or for other Portuguese funding and evaluation bodies) depend on that body’s own policy and the collaboration protocols FCT has established with it.
Who can register for CIÊNCIAVITAE?
Anyone working in the Portuguese academic and research context, Portuguese national or foreign, per FCT’s own description of the platform’s intended users — students, researchers, and institutions.
What is the difference between CIÊNCIAVITAE and Ciência ID?
Ciência ID is the underlying unique identifier and authentication credential; CIÊNCIAVITAE is the curriculum-vitae platform built around it. A researcher registers for a Ciência ID, and that identifier is what authenticates them into CIÊNCIAVITAE and the other connected Portuguese systems.
Related CASRAI resources
- CRIS & Persistent Identifiers hub — the full cluster of CASRAI content on research information systems and identifier infrastructure.
- ORCID iD — the international persistent identifier CIÊNCIAVITAE synchronizes with.
- Persistent identifier (PID) — the broader concept Ciência ID and ORCID are both instances of.
- CRIS (current research information system) — the category of system CIÊNCIAVITAE functions as, in Portugal’s national context.
- Lattes Platform: Brazil’s National Researcher CV and Identifier System — a directly comparable national researcher-CV and identifier system in another country.
