u/ImpressiveFudge7442

I've been building an open-source tool that assembles a researcher's full output from open metadata (disclosure: I'm the dev), and doing it surfaced a few things about the current state of open publishing metadata that I think are worth discussing here.

Short version: between ORCID, OpenAlex, Crossref, DataCite, DBLP, OpenAIRE and the funder/patent/trial registries, you can now pull a fairly complete, structured record of someone's outputs — not just journal articles, but datasets, software, grants, patents, clinical trials, editorial/peer-review roles and conference papers. A few years ago this meant scraping or manual entry; now it's mostly public APIs.

What's actually hard, and where it gets interesting for this crowd:

• Deduplication. The same output shows up across sources with different (or missing) DOIs and inconsistent metadata, so merging by identifier and resolving conflicts is most of the work. OpenAlex vs Crossref vs a funder record for the same paper rarely agree perfectly.
• Author disambiguation. Matching by author identifier (ORCID / OpenAlex author ID) is night-and-day better than name-string matching, which mangles common and non-Western names — but it depends on people actually having and using their ORCID.
• Coverage is very uneven by field and output type. STEM works are well covered via OpenAlex, CS conference papers via DBLP, datasets/software via DataCite/OpenAIRE. Humanities coverage is noticeably thinner, and editorial roles or software are only as good as what people deposit.

Genuinely curious what people here have run into: how complete do you find the open record for your own (or your authors') outputs? Where does it fall down worst — coverage, metadata quality, disambiguation? And is anyone treating OpenAlex as the backbone now, or still stitching in Scopus/WoS?

(The tool, for context: https://sigmacv.org, code at https://github.com/BasileChretien/sigmacv  free and open-source, but I'm mainly here for the metadata discussion.)

The thing that finally pushed me to build this was reformatting my CV and pub list for the Nth funder application, each wanting a different layout and citation style. Most of that info already exists in open databases, so I was basically retyping what was already out there.

So, SigmaCV: you sign in with ORCID and it assembles your CV from the open research record, pulling from ORCID, OpenAlex, Crossref, DataCite, DBLP and a few funder/registry databases. And it's not just your papers, it also brings in datasets, software, grants, patents, clinical trials, editorial and peer-review roles, and conference papers, so your whole research footprint is in one place. Citations get formatted in whatever style you need (it runs on CSL, the same engine Zotero uses, so they're the real styles), and you can export the lot to PDF, Word, LaTeX, Markdown, BibTeX, or straight into funder formats like NIH biosketch, ERC, MSCA, NSF, JSPS. Change the style once and everything reformats.

It's not generate-and-forget. It auto-fills the tedious part, then you curate: drop what isn't actually yours, reorder, hide sections, set the style. What ends up on it is still your call, it just kills the data entry.

There's also an optional public page: one link that stays current on its own, you publish or release something and it just shows up, nothing to edit. Good for an email signature / ORCID / your website, basically a free, auto-updating researcher profile. Here's mine if you want to see what one looks like: https://sigmacv.org/p/basile-chretien-453f107e40a2add08892

Honest caveat: if you've already got a clean Zotero library and a LaTeX/biblatex setup, your publications are covered and you might not need this for that. But that's your papers, this also tracks the datasets, software, grants, patents and editorial work a reference manager doesn't, and it's the whole CV plus a living link without the upkeep. It's more for people who haven't kept a complete library of their own outputs, aren't in LaTeX (a lot of fields live in Word), or just want everything in one place.

On the obvious trust question: free, open-source (Apache-2.0, repo below), not-for-profit, no ads, nothing sold. The ORCID login is standard OAuth, so it never sees your password, only reads your public record, and you can revoke it anytime, or self-host the whole thing.

Sharing in case it saves someone else the grunt work. Happy to answer anything.

🔗 https://sigmacv.org
💻 https://github.com/BasileChretien/sigmacv

(I'm the developer.)