Editorial

Editorial CSIC celebrates 75 years of scholarly publishing

Founded in 1940 as the Spanish National Research Council’s (CSIC) ’Publications Office’, just months after the creation of the Council itself, Editorial CSIC is now celebrating its 75^th anniversary.

We have come a very long way as a scholarly publisher of scientific books, monographs and journals, attested to by a 13 000-title strong historic catalogue and over 2 300 books and 37 scientific journals in our live catalogue. From the outset, our publishing activity has covered a host of disciplines in science and technology, social science, the arts and humanities. Our aim has been and continues to be to serve the scientific community and society at large, in the broadest possible definition of both, by reporting on outstanding research, technological developments, innovation and culture, in professionally edited, technically solvent publications.

Editorial CSIC has been and continues to be a benchmark and a vehicle for scientific communication in Spain. It is fully open to authors from other institutions and adheres to the most demanding criteria of scientific and publishing quality. Our notion of scholarly quality is based on content, its strict academic accreditation via peer review and editorial processes controlled and certified by outside agencies. Editorial CSIC also attaches particular importance to high quality scientific dissemination, which is instrumental to knowledge transfer to society as a whole. Looking toward the future, we intend not only to conserve this quality-oriented, open attitude, but to broaden it through innovation and the application of new publishing technologies.

Our pursuit of quality and academic accreditation has been endorsed by the listing of our books and scientific journals on the most highly reputed international indexing services, such as Thomson Reuters’s Book Citation Index and Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus, as well as on many other domestic and international specialised databases.

Further to the institutional commitment stemming from CSIC’s 2006 adherence to The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, Editorial CSIC allows open access to its scientific journals and many of its other on-line products. It has pioneered the use of professional tools for the on-line publication of scientific journals in Spain, without neglecting its indispensable presence in social networks.

I take this opportunity to highlight the significant contribution made by the Eduardo Torroja Institute for Construction Science (IETcc) to our publications in the fields of its specialisation, materials science and construction and building technology. That contribution adopts the form of two scientific journals, Materiales de Construcción and Informes de la Construcción, and a monographic series, Monografías del Instituto Eduardo Torroja, for which the scientific editing is conducted primarily by IETcc researchers. All three are benchmarks in their respective specialities.

We are commemorating an anniversary that should inspire us to train our sights on the realities and future of increasingly professional, competitive, innovative and integrated scientific publishing. The ultimate and ambitious aim sought is to establish a standard-setting institutional publishing house that pursues the enhancement of knowledge and scientific propagation while rising to the challenges posed in the twenty-first century.

Ramón B. Rodríguez
Director, Editorial CSIC
http://editorial.csic.es
http://edicionelectronica.csic.es