CvLAC (Currículum Vitae de Latinoamérica y el Caribe) is Colombia’s national, standardized electronic researcher CV. It is the individual-level module of ScienTI, the information system operated by Minciencias (Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación) to register and classify the people, research groups, and institutions that make up Colombia’s National Science, Technology and Innovation System (Sistema Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación, SNCTeI). If you work with Colombian research administration, CvLAC is the system a researcher’s academic training, publications, and other scientific production are recorded in — and it is functionally distinct from a global persistent identifier like an ORCID iD, even though both aim to solve the same underlying problem of attaching a researcher’s work reliably to their identity.
What CvLAC Is and Who Runs It
CvLAC has been in continuous use since 2002, originally developed by Colciencias, the predecessor agency that became Minciencias when Colombia elevated its science-and-technology function to a cabinet-level ministry between 2019 and 2021. The platform is self-service: an individual researcher, academic, or innovator creates an account, logs in with a personal password, and enters their own data directly — CvLAC is not populated by a third party or scraped from other sources. That self-reported design is a deliberate feature of the ScienTI model: the platform exists to let researchers document their own trajectory in a format Minciencias, universities, and funding-call evaluators can read consistently across the whole system.
A CvLAC profile organizes a person’s record around three broad categories that Minciencias uses to type and later recognize a researcher’s contribution to CTeI (ciencia, tecnología e innovación): academic training (degrees, institutions, dates), academic and scientific production (publications, patents, software, and other outputs), and support for training human research capacity (thesis direction, mentoring of junior researchers, teaching linked to research formation). This structure is what later feeds Minciencias’ researcher recognition and measurement calls (see below) — CvLAC is not just a repository, it is the evidentiary base an evaluation is run against.
CvLAC, GrupLAC, and InstituLAC: The Three Tiers of ScienTI Colombia
CvLAC is one of three linked registries inside the ScienTI-Colombia platform, each operating at a different level:
- CvLAC — the individual researcher’s CV, described above.
- GrupLAC — the directory record for a research group. Group leaders register the group’s identity, research lines, and members in GrupLAC, and each member’s contribution is drawn from their linked CvLAC profile. When a researcher is added as a group member, ScienTI classifies them into one of a small set of roles within that group — for example, established researcher, researcher-in-training, undergraduate student, or linked/associated member — which determines how their production counts toward the group’s own evaluation.
- InstituLAC — the institutional-level directory, used to view and register the universities, hospitals, companies, and other organizations that host or sponsor the research groups registered in GrupLAC.
The three registries are relational, not siloed: a group’s measured output is built from its members’ CvLAC records, and an institution’s profile in InstituLAC aggregates the groups it hosts. This is the same layered logic a CRIS (Current Research Information System) uses elsewhere in the world to link person records, projects, and outputs — ScienTI is, functionally, Colombia’s national CRIS, even though Minciencias does not typically market it using that international vendor terminology.
What a CvLAC Profile Is Used For
The most consequential use of CvLAC is Minciencias’ periodic Convocatoria de Reconocimiento y Medición de Grupos de Investigación, Desarrollo Tecnológico o de Innovación y de Investigadores — the national call that formally recognizes and classifies research groups and individual researchers based on the production documented in GrupLAC and CvLAC. Researchers who clear defined thresholds of academic production, formation activity, and training support are classified into recognized categories, commonly reported as tiers such as Investigador Senior, Investigador Asociado, and Investigador Junior. That classification, in turn, is a factor institutions and funding calls use when assessing a researcher’s track record — a current, complete CvLAC profile is effectively a prerequisite for being considered at all, not an optional add-on.
Beyond the recognition call, most Minciencias funding programs require applicants to have an active, up-to-date CvLAC profile as part of the application itself, and require named group members to be registered in GrupLAC. CASRAI’s separate guide to Minciencias’ funding mechanisms covers that application-side requirement — the Fondo Francisco José de Caldas, the royalty-financed Sistema General de Regalías, and how international collaborators typically participate without needing their own CvLAC unless they are formally affiliated with a Colombian host institution. This page focuses on CvLAC itself as a system — its structure, its role as Colombia’s researcher-identity infrastructure, and how it compares to other national and global identifier systems — rather than on funding-call mechanics.
CvLAC vs. ORCID: Two Different Kinds of Identifier
It is easy to conflate CvLAC with ORCID because both give a researcher a persistent, self-managed online profile of their work. They are not equivalent, and conflating them causes real friction for anyone advising a Colombian researcher publishing internationally:
- Scope. ORCID is a global, discipline- and country-agnostic researcher identifier maintained by an independent nonprofit; CvLAC is a Colombian national system administered by a government ministry, scoped to Colombia’s own CTeI ecosystem (though, as the ScienTI section below explains, the underlying registry model is shared regionally).
- Governance and purpose. ORCID’s core function is disambiguation and interoperable metadata exchange — connecting a researcher’s identifier to their outputs across publishers, funders, and institutions worldwide via API. CvLAC’s core function is national policy administration: it is the documentary basis Minciencias uses to recognize researchers, evaluate groups, and gate funding eligibility within Colombia.
- Interoperability. ORCID iDs are widely embedded in publisher and funder systems by design, via a public API and standard integrations. CvLAC does not have the same kind of broad, standardized third-party integration; it functions primarily as a closed national system consulted directly through Minciencias’ own portals rather than as connective infrastructure other systems auto-populate from. Colombian researchers publishing internationally typically maintain both: an ORCID iD for the global publishing and funding ecosystem, and a CvLAC profile because it is a condition of participating in Colombia’s national research system.
In CRIS terms, CvLAC functions closer to a national person record and evaluation dossier than to a persistent identifier (PID) in the technical sense ORCID, DOI, or ROR use the term — it identifies and evaluates a person within one national administrative system rather than resolving identity across systems. Readers working through identifier interoperability generally may also find CASRAI’s identifier crosswalk guide and ISNI vs. ORCID comparison useful background.
CvLAC in the Regional ScienTI / Latin American CRIS Landscape
CvLAC did not develop in isolation. It is Colombia’s implementation of a shared regional model: national CV and research-information platforms built on a common conceptual template that spread across several Latin American science systems from the late 1990s onward, generally understood to trace back to Brazil’s Plataforma Lattes (operated by CNPq). Argentina’s SIGEVA, run by CONICET, is a close regional analog worth reading alongside this page — it bundles CV management with grant administration and peer evaluation in one platform, whereas Colombia keeps CV registration (CvLAC), group registration (GrupLAC), and funding administration procedurally separate, even though all three ultimately sit under Minciencias.
Comparing CvLAC to the commercial CRIS/research-information-management platforms covered elsewhere on CASRAI — Pure, Symplectic Elements, Converis, DSpace-CRIS — is useful mainly as a category check, not a feature comparison: CvLAC predates most of those products’ adoption in Latin America, is not vendor software an institution licenses and configures, and was built to serve one government’s specific recognition and funding-eligibility workflows rather than as general-purpose research-information-management infrastructure for a single institution to run. See CASRAI’s CRIS vs. institutional repository vs. RIMS comparison and the persistent identifiers and research information systems pillar for that broader landscape.
How This Page Differs From CASRAI’s Other Minciencias Coverage
CASRAI covers Minciencias from three distinct angles, and it’s worth being explicit about which is which:
- This page covers CvLAC as a researcher-identity and CRIS-adjacent system — what it is, how it’s structured, and how it compares to identifier infrastructure like ORCID and to CRIS platforms generally.
- CASRAI’s Minciencias funding overview covers the funding mechanisms Minciencias administers — the Fondo Francisco José de Caldas, the Sistema General de Regalías, and how international researchers engage with Colombian-funded calls (where CvLAC is mentioned only as an application prerequisite, not explained in depth).
- CASRAI’s guide to Colombia’s research integrity oversight covers Minciencias’ role in national research-ethics and scientific-integrity policy and the National Bioethics Council — a governance function entirely separate from CvLAC/ScienTI and not something a CvLAC profile factors into.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does CvLAC stand for?
CvLAC stands for Currículum Vitae de Latinoamérica y el Caribe (“curriculum vitae of Latin America and the Caribbean”). Despite the regional name, the platform as operated today is Colombia’s national system, run by Minciencias.
Is CvLAC the same thing as ORCID?
No. CvLAC is a Colombian national administrative registry used by Minciencias to document and evaluate researchers within Colombia’s science system. ORCID is a global, vendor-neutral persistent identifier used across publishers, funders, and institutions worldwide. Many Colombian researchers maintain both, for different purposes.
Do international collaborators need their own CvLAC profile?
Generally not, unless they are formally affiliated with a Colombian host institution or are named as a member of a Colombian research group in GrupLAC. See CASRAI’s Minciencias funding overview for how international participation typically works in practice.
What is the difference between CvLAC and GrupLAC?
CvLAC is the individual researcher’s CV. GrupLAC is the registry for a research group, and it draws on the CvLAC profiles of that group’s members to build the group’s own record and evaluation.
Is a system like CvLAC used anywhere outside Colombia?
Colombia’s specific CvLAC/GrupLAC/InstituLAC implementation is national, but it follows a regional model shared conceptually with other Latin American systems, most notably Brazil’s Lattes platform and Argentina’s SIGEVA. Each country’s system is run by its own national science agency and is not directly interoperable with the others.
Who administers CvLAC?
Minciencias (Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación), Colombia’s national science ministry, administers CvLAC as part of the broader ScienTI-Colombia platform.
