Frequently Asked Questions

There are three key reasons why BU implemented My CV.

• First, it provides a place to maintain and aggregate faculty members’ scholarly outputs. This will simplify the annual FAR exercise because faculty will have been adding their activities to the system on an ongoing basis and therefore will have to complete a confirmatory check (“are any of my outputs missing?) rather than a massive, one-time data entry effort.
• Second, the new system will help to both highlight and facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations across the University. To highlight existing collaborations, My CV automatically displays visualization features such as the number of co-authorships. To help facilitate new partnerships, My CV features a keyword search that allows a user to enter a keyword and find other faculty members at BU who have a publication or grant that also features the specified keyword.
• Third, My CV will help faculty adhere with BU’s Open Access Policy by flagging publications that fall under the policy and enabling deposit of the publications into OpenBU, the Open Access Repository.

No, if you are a faculty member that is required to submit the Faculty Annual Report (FAR) and/or External and International Activity Report (EIAR)  you will use My CV for those exercises.

Yes. You can give someone delegate access to your profile by going to Account settings and selecting Manage delegates.

Contact your My CV Liaison for more help with your profile. The Liaison can help you determine who to contact to correct information. The Liaison can also contact the IT Help Center and follow up on the resolution.

Each activity type has a number of required fields that must be filled out before an item is saved. These are marked with a red asterisk. Sometimes users may receive a message like “An item in … is currently being edited.” This means that a field such as institution or co-author has information in progress that has not been added. The system allows for multiple addresses, co-authors, etc. to be entered, so you need to click “Add” after each one, even if you are only entering one (see below).

Navigate to your profile page by clicking Menu > View Profile (under the My Account heading). Click on the Edit Profile button in the upper right. From here you can edit your overview paragraph, manage your photo, as well as other settings.

This is because you have entered a Preferred Name for yourself in BUWorks, which is replacing only your First Name in My CV. To fix this issue:

1. Log in to BUWorks (https://ppo.buw.bu.edu/)
2. Navigate to the Employee Self-Service page
3. Click Personal Information
4. Click Personal Profile
5. Click the pencil icon under the Personal Data section of the screen
6. Modify your Preferred Name

In this Preferred Name field, you should enter the name that you would like to display as your first name in My CV.

You are able to correct your address yourself by following these steps:

1. Log in to BUWorks (https://ppo.buw.bu.edu/)
2. Navigate to the Employee Self-Service page
3. Click Personal Information
4. Click Office Address
5. Click Edit/Create
6. If the Building listed is incorrect, select the correct Building from the drop down list
7. If the Office Room # is incorrect, make the necessary changes
8. Click Review
9. If the address looks correct, click Save

Once you have corrected this in BUWorks, your address will appear correctly in My CV on the following business day.

At this time, only your current BU appointments are being pre-populated into your My CV Profile. This information is coming from BUWorks. Sometime in the future, your past BU appointments will also automatically be populated in My CV.

For now, you should manually add only non-BU appointments into My CV. For specific instructions on how to do this see the My CV-Profile User Guide, which can be found on the Training and Support page. .

Your education information is coming from BUWorks, which may be missing some degrees and certificates.

If there is a degree missing from your My CV Profile, or if the information associated with any of your degrees is appearing incorrectly, please contact your My CV Liaison, as these issues need to be addressed in BUWorks.Once the issue is fixed in BUWorks, your degree or certificate will appear correctly in your My CV Profile the following business day.

You can edit data in scholarly & creative works records. The way in which this is done depends on whether the record is manual or was sourced online by the system. In cases where the record has come from one of the online databases, you will not be able to edit the record directly. Instead, you will need to create a manual record to supplement the one that already exists. To edit a manual record, open the detailed view of the record for the work you wish to change and click the dark blue Edit Record button. Don’t forget to save your changes once you are finished.

When you view your scholarly & creative work list, under each work, you should see its type (i.e., scholarly article, conference paper, review). Click on the small pencil icon, and you can change the type in the dropdown menu. Then click “Save.”

This means that you have publications that fall under BU’s opt-out open access policy. My CV identifies your scholarly articles that fall under the policy and prompts you to deposit them to OpenBU, BU’s institutional repository, which you can do by uploading your final author draft (or accepted manuscript) to My CV.

Information about the policy, and contact options, can be found at BU’s Open Access Policy webpage (https://www.bu.edu/policies/open-access-policy/).

My CV retrieves from ORCID only journal articles that have DOIs or PubMed identifiers. If a publication in your ORCID profile does not have a DOI or PubMed identifier, if it is private, or if it is NOT a journal article, it will not be retrieved by My CV.

You can run a bulk import of your publications from another data source, by importing a Reference Manager/EndNote or Bibtex file. Instructions are available in the Quick Reference Import Publications from Google Scholar guide. If you have difficulty in creating a Reference Manager/EndNote or Bibtex file, or can only export publication data in other file formats, contact Digital Scholarship Services for assistance in importing your publication data.

This can happen for a number of reasons, including if you are a part-time faculty member and published while you were not actively employed at BU or if you are a Post-Doctoral student. In either of these cases, you are not required to deposit your publication to Open BU. To address this, please elect to “Set an exception” from within the Deposit Page in My CV and apply the exception type of “Other”. You may optionally add a note to the librarians to explain why the publication does not fall under the policy.

Also, you might have deposited your publication in OpenBU before My CV was rolled out to your school or college, or your publication might have already been archived in OpenBU because it was published in a BU journal that submits its back issues to OpenBU. In future, we will have a way to connect the record of your publication in My CV with your submission to OpenBU. To address this currently, add an “Other” exception as described above.

After you submit an article to OpenBU, the BU Libraries carefully reviews your submission, checking the file version to ensure compliance with the open access policy and providing descriptive metadata to ensure that your article is discoverable. If there are any issues with your submission, the Libraries will notify you via email that your submission needs to be changed and provide instructions to do so. This generally results when the file that you have deposited is not the final author draft, and you will be asked to upload an additional file. If you cannot delete a file in MyCV after you deposit, please contact open-help@bu.edu.

The project start date is the start date of a grant (competing segment), including any pre-award authorization period.

The project end dates is the end date of the grant (competing segment), defined as the current budget period plus any unfunded periods, including possible option years, unless the submission of a proposal is required to trigger the option years.

The obligated amount represents the amount in which you have been authorized to spend, based on the notice of award from the sponsor. The anticipated amount represents the amount in which is projected to receive over the life of the award. For example, if you are in year 2 of a 5 year award, your obligated amount may be $200K but your anticipated amount is $500K, because you are receiving $100K per year.

Grants will be imported to your profile if you are the Principal Investigator, Multiple-PI, or Co-PI listed at the grant level only. We understand there are circumstances where an individual may be listed as a PI or CO-PI on specific accounts under a grant. However, this data will not be pre-populated into your profile. If you feel that this funding should be represented in your profile, then you are able to manually add the grant to your profile.

At any given time, only three calendar years’ worth of course you’ve taught at BU are reflected in My CV. This decision was meant to keep the course list in My CV from being too repetitive. If you wish for an older course to be reflected in your My CV profile, it is quick and easy to add a manual record. See section 4 of the My CV-Teaching User Guide, which can be found on the Training and Support page.

In order to reflect the cross-disciplinary aspect of the cross-listed courses you’ve taught, there is some combining of course information for courses that meet the criteria for cross-listed courses. If you have a concern about the display of one of your BU courses, please contact your My CV Liaison, as these issues need to be addressed in the Registrar system.

If you have received an email notification from the Provost’s office and/or your academic leadership indicating that the FAR cycle has opened but are unable to access it in My CV, you should contact your My CV Liaison. Your liaison can help determine why you are unable to access the FAR in My CV.

If a particular activity isn’t pulling into your FAR report, it either doesn’t have a reporting date within the past calendar year or it is not currently claimed in your My CV profile. Please claim or manually add items to your profile before starting your FAR. Professional activity items also need to be marked as “internal service” or “external service” when manually entered in order to pull into the correct section of your FAR. You may edit an existing item to add/correct dates or indicate service type by clicking on the item, and then clicking “Edit record.”

Professional activities, such as committee memberships, have start dates and end dates. If an end date is left blank, My CV will interpret it as an ongoing activity until an end date is added. The FAR looks at professional activity date ranges when pulling in eligible items, so as long as the previous calendar year is included within the date range on an activity, it can be used year after year without entering it. If a professional activity item was added before Fall 2020, you may need to edit it to select a service type–Internal (BU) or External (non-BU)–so that it pulls into the appropriate section of the FAR.

If you have accidentally clicked “Add Item” and then click “Cancel”, a blank item still appears in your FAR. To delete it, click the red X in the upper right hand corner of the item.

No, only six (6) distinctions and awards, five (5) internal service activities, and five (5) external service activities will appear on the 1 page export report. The report indicates the total number of items, so the full FAR report may be referenced as necessary.

Yes, the FAR can be exported to PDF in two formats: a full version of the report and the one page summary report that is provided to the Provost’s Office. When you’re in your FAR exercise, locate the Export to PDF button on the bottom, right hand side of the page.

Your FAR will remain editable until your department/program administrator moves it into the review cycle. Once it has been moved, you will no longer be able to edit your FAR but you will have the ability to view it as submitted.

The FAR and EIAR are separate exercises with different review paths— the FAR is required as part of Annual Faculty Merit Review, and the EIAR is required to ensure adherence to the University’s Conflict of Commitment Policy.

Prior to My CV, the old EAR was administered in a separate system from the old FAR and required faculty to enter external activities manually from scratch. Now, the EIAR is set up in My CV to allow users to select external activities they have already entered into the system for the purposes of the FAR, without having to retype them. An additional step of entering in compensated/uncompensated status and number of hours is required in the EIAR due to the reporting mandates outlined in the Faculty Handbook.