Kill the Canadian Common CV, researchers urge the tri-council

For years, the inadequacy of the Canadian Common CV (or CCV for short) has been the subject of many Twitter vents, some of which are quite amusing, among the scientists who use it. There have been consultations and reiterations of the CCV since it was launched in 2002, but it has never fully overcome its reputation for being buggy, confusing and a time suck for researchers, rather than, as was intended, a time saver.

The CCV is run by the tri-council of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and is used by an additional 28 other bodies, including provincial governments and not-for-profit research organizations.

Now, more than 2,000 CCV users and counting have signed an open letter calling for it to be killed. “It is time to abandon the Canadian Common CV and move to a simpler solution,” reads the letter, which was written by eight academics from seven universities. “The CCV is beyond saving, revising or reinventing.”

Signatories are primarily professors, but also include “postdocs, patient partners, industry partners, students, admin assistants, research staff and even a few Canada 150 Research Chairs,” according to Holly Witteman, one of the letter’s authors and an associate professor in the department of family and emergency medicine at Université Laval.

Their gripes are many, including that the CCV discourages international partners from collaborating on Canadian-funded research projects (starting a CCV from scratch is especially cumbersome), that it wastes institutional funds, and that it disadvantages younger researchers, as well as female scientists and people of colour, who are less likely to have staff members to do the data entry for them.

Dr. Witteman says she helped write the letter after hearing that the CCV board was developing “a third iteration” of the CCV. The process is bound to fail, says Dr. Witteman, because “it’s not possible for a system to do everything that the CCV is supposed to do.”

The CCV was meant to allow researchers to enter information that could be used in multiple different versions, and to collect usable, structured data. Both goals haven’t panned out, in part because many different kinds of organizations use the CCV and build their own templates within it, Dr. Witteman explains. “The data is very low quality and extremely incomplete,” she says. For example, funding competitions might ask for all publications, or the last five or two years of publications, making it impossible to compare publication records.

Adrian Mota, acting associate vice-president of research, knowledge translation and ethics at CIHR, says, however, that the tri-council isn’t revamping the CCV. “It’s really some minor stuff to try and improve the user experience,” he says. He also points out that abandoning the CCV isn’t so simple. “It’s quite complicated from a technical perspective because we’ve integrated the application within our other platforms,” he says, explaining that the CCV collects and pushes data across a larger grants management system.

And while Mr. Mota agrees that the data have “limitations,” he says “the value of the data is not zero.” The tri-council uses CCV data to calculate how to distribute indirect costs of research, such as the costs associated with administration and regulatory reporting requirements. The data have also been used to study how leaves of absence impact scientists’ career trajectories, he says.

Pierre-Gerlier Forest, director of the school of public policy at the University of Calgary, says the CCV was designed for those with “traditional, linear careers.” He says he signed on to the letter because it frequently took “two weeks, with the help of an assistant” to complete the CCV for a funding application. He found that the standardized template didn’t allow him to provide adequate detail of his work within government or his research abroad, while demanding information “like how much was my SSHRC grant two decades ago” that he couldn’t easily access.

Colleen Derkatch, an associate professor in the department of English at Ryerson University, agrees that the CCV was designed for a subset of its current users. “It’s way too much infrastructure for people in the humanities,” she says, explaining that when she uses the CCV, she has to click through pages of categories that don’t apply to her research on language and discourse, such as those related to litigations and patents.

Her colleagues, she says, have told her the CCV was a factor in their decisions not to apply to certain grants, and one of her fellow humanities researchers said he recently applied for a SSHRC grant without bothering to update his CCV, which could put him at a disadvantage.

The signatories are calling for a “page-limited CV that people can edit in whatever word processing software they like,” Dr. Witteman says, since additional tools like bibliometric analyses and separate disclosure statements from equity-seeking groups already exist for data collection.

But not all academics are in agreement. Pradeep Reddy Raamana, a neuroscientist and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto, says collecting structured data ensures accountability. “You invest, let’s say, $500 million last year. Where did that money go? Did funding decisions make sense? To quantitatively understand how the reviewers’ recommendations were made, we need data, and high-quality data can only be obtained from a platform like CCV.”

Rather than going to a free-form biosketch – a short summary of one’s work, such as that used by the U.S. National Institutes of Health – Dr. Raamana wants the tri-council to “re-implement the current interface and have a better architecture for the database, and additional support for researchers.” He’d also like to see far more transparency. “There is no publicly accessible information about the CCV consultations that have taken place,” he says. “There is absolutely no information on the CCV website or anywhere else, what was invested into it so far, and what are they planning to do going forward.”

For the tri-council, the future of the CCV may be part of a larger shift. Mr. Mota explains that other data systems used by the tri-council, like ResearchNet, are aging as well and the three agencies are currently exploring the possibility of a new solution for grants management as a whole. The tri-council is beginning to “journey map” and is consulting this fall with the Canadian Association of Research Administrators and the U15 group of research-intensive universities, he says. In this process, “a lot of the suggestions that people are putting forward, like the NIH biosketch and ORCID (a digital identifier), are all things we’re considering.”