CVN (Currículum Vitae Normalizado, “Normalized Curriculum Vitae”) is Spain’s standardized format for presenting a researcher’s professional and scientific trajectory. It is developed and maintained by FECYT — the Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology), a public foundation under Spain’s Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. CVN exists to solve a specific administrative problem: before it existed, researchers applying to different Spanish public funding calls (state plans, regional/autonomous-community plans, and individual agency programs) each faced a different CV template, forcing them to re-enter the same career history repeatedly in incompatible formats.
Not to be confused with: CVN is unrelated to Spain’s research-ethics committee system (CEEI, the Comité Español de Ética de la Investigación) — see CASRAI’s guide on Spain’s CEEI and how it differs from Catalonia’s CIR-Cat for that separate topic. CVN is a CV/curriculum data standard, not an ethics-review body.
What CVN Standardizes
CVN is built on the Norma CVN (CVN Standard), a set of technical specifications defining a common schema for every field of a researcher’s curriculum: identity and contact data, academic qualifications, employment history, publications, funded projects, patents, supervised theses, and other research activity. Because every CV built to the standard shares the same underlying data structure, a CVN-format curriculum can, in principle, be read, validated, and reused consistently by any funding body or institutional system that accepts the format — rather than each agency defining its own CV template and researchers manually reformatting their history for every application.
FECYT periodically publishes an updated manual of the Norma CVN, revising and extending the field-level specification as reporting needs evolve. Research administrators supporting Spanish-funded projects should treat the current published manual on fecyt.es as the authoritative reference for field definitions, rather than any third-party summary, since the standard is revised over time.
Where CVN Is Required
CVN is the standard curriculum format used across public funding calls issued under Spain’s State Plan for Scientific, Technical and Innovation Research and by individual funding and research bodies, including the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI). Applicants to many national and regional (autonomous-community) research grants are asked to submit their curriculum in CVN format rather than a free-form CV, so that application reviewers and funding-agency systems receive a consistently structured record for every candidate.
A related but distinct variant, CVA (Currículum Vitae Abreviado) — specifically the CVA ANECA template — is required for Spain’s state accreditation process for access to university teaching posts (Cuerpos Docentes Universitarios, including the ACADEMIA programme), administered by ANECA (Agencia Nacional de Evaluación de la Calidad y Acreditación). CVA is an abbreviated profile built from the same underlying CVN data model rather than an unrelated format, which is why the two are frequently mentioned together in Spanish university library and research-office guidance.
The CVN Editor
FECYT provides a free online application, the Editor CVN, that lets a researcher build a CV directly in CVN format, or import an existing curriculum and convert it. According to FECYT’s own service documentation, the Editor accepts import from several existing formats — including prior CVN-PDF submissions, the CICYT model CV historically used for Spanish research applications, and Formae — so that a researcher does not have to start from a blank record every time the standard or an agency’s submission requirements change.
How CVN Relates to ORCID
CVN and ORCID serve different purposes and are not competing standards: ORCID assigns a persistent, globally unique identifier to a researcher and lets that researcher maintain a portable record of their affiliations and works across publishers, funders, and institutions worldwide. CVN is a national, Spain-specific curriculum format — a way of structuring the full content of a CV — used specifically for domestic funding-agency and accreditation submissions.
The two are complementary in practice rather than interchangeable: FECYT’s Editor CVN documentation states that publication data can be imported into a CVN record from external sources, including directly from a researcher’s ORCID record, alongside import from bibliographic databases such as PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus. This lets a researcher who already maintains their publication list in ORCID pull that data into a CVN submission rather than re-typing it, though the CVN record itself — covering employment history, funded projects, theses supervised, and the other fields the Norma CVN defines — is considerably broader than what an ORCID record alone captures. Research administrators should treat CVN as the Spain-specific application format and ORCID as the underlying, discipline- and border-agnostic identifier and publication-tracking layer that can feed into it, not as two versions of the same thing.
CVN and Spain’s Broader Research-Information Landscape
CVN sits alongside, rather than inside, Spain’s institutional CRIS (Current Research Information System) deployments. A university or research center’s CRIS platform typically manages the institution’s own internal record of its researchers, projects, and outputs; CVN is the external-facing curriculum format that a researcher exports (or that a CRIS system may be configured to help generate) specifically to satisfy a funding agency’s or accreditation body’s submission requirement. Where an institution’s CRIS supports CVN export directly, it can reduce duplicate data entry between the institutional system and a funding application — but the extent and mechanics of that integration vary by CRIS vendor and are not standardized the way ORCID’s API is, so administrators should confirm the specific capability with their own CRIS provider rather than assume it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does CVN stand for?
Currículum Vitae Normalizado — literally “Normalized Curriculum Vitae.” It refers to both the standardized CV format itself and, informally, to the Norma CVN specification and the FECYT platform that supports it.
Who maintains the CVN standard?
FECYT (Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología), a public foundation under Spain’s national ministry responsible for science and innovation, develops and publishes the Norma CVN and operates the Editor CVN platform.
Is CVN mandatory for all Spanish research funding applications?
Requirements vary by call and funding body. Many state-plan and autonomous-community research grants, and specific agencies such as AEI, request curricula in CVN format as part of their standard application requirements. Applicants should always confirm the exact format requirement in the specific convocatoria (call for proposals) they are responding to, since requirements can differ by programme and are updated over time.
Is CVN the same as CVA ANECA?
No — they are related but distinct. CVA (Currículum Vitae Abreviado) is a shorter, purpose-built profile used specifically for ANECA’s university teaching-post accreditation process, built from the same underlying CVN data model. CVN itself is the broader, general-purpose standardized CV format used across research funding applications.
Can I import my ORCID publications into a CVN record?
FECYT’s Editor CVN documentation states that publication data can be imported from several sources, including directly from ORCID, as well as from PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus records. This avoids re-entering publication data by hand into a CVN submission.
Does CVN replace the need for an ORCID iD?
No. They serve different functions. ORCID provides a persistent, internationally recognized identifier and portable record for a researcher; CVN is Spain’s national curriculum-format standard used for domestic funding and accreditation submissions. Many Spanish researchers maintain both.
