The founding of Materiales de Construcción in 1949 and the course it has followed since are indivisibly bound to the National Research Council’s (CSIC’s) Technical Institute for Construction and Cement, today the Eduardo Torroja Institute for Construction Science. The journal embodies the two dimensions that define the ultimate purpose of research: to generate knowledge and to clear pathways to channel and convert that knowledge into wealth for the scientific community, production sectors and the end beneficiary of progress and innovation, civil society at large.
Despite the general hardship and autarchy prevailing at the time, the very year the recently instituted CSIC was created, 1940, the Council endorsed a project to establish a publications service. It was the forerunner of today’s ‘Editorial CSIC’, which has now been engaged in publishing for over 80 years. Only shortly thereafter, what began at the ITCC as a modest, unstably titled in-house newsletter saw the light: a proto-journal that squired a research institution of great strategic value in its quest for a window with a view.
The cover on the earliest issues of this ‘limited circulation newsletter’, with the Institute’s logo in the header, might well be seen as emblematic of its times, with two of the initials set into the other two as in a Latin cross. The all-male governing board was likewise symptomatic of the era, as was the mission announced: to report on advances in construction at a time, shortly after the end of the Civil War, when the country was in the slow and painful process of reconstruction. Yearly tenders to incentivise the construction of thousands of dwellings served as encouragement for the Institute and its publications to pursue a purpose of national interest: to further and disseminate experimental research, especially on cement and its applications, conducted to no commercial end but rather to be of service to builders, manufacturers, engineers and architects.
In 1985, when the journal joined forces with Editorial CSIC, Materiales de Construccion was taken integrally into the institutional fold. With its bilingual Spanish-English format, an editorial board with members from a number of scientific-academic institutions and a peer review system in place, it soon became one of the Council’s most highly representative and esteemed journals. With Dr. Francisca Puertas as Editor-in-Chief from 1997 to 2019, the journal scored a landmark success in 1998: a listing in the highly reputed ISI WOS/JCR database, where the journal has since climbed to the upper quartile in its category. In 2020 Dr Puertas was named Honorary Editor-in-Chief, a distinction specifically designed to reward her for her intense dedication and rigorous management.
CSIC has been an enthusiastic supporter of open access publishing since the outset. Materiales de Construcción committed to that principle in 2009 after two years of publishing a digital edition in PDF format with a six-month lag time. The digital and print editions co-existed until 2014, when the journal’s four issues were released in PDF, HTML and XMLJATS formats, exclusively in English.
In 2019 Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (FECYT: a Spanish foundation for science and technology) ranked national journals by subject area: Materiales de Construcción was the only one of the 396 included in the repertory to be awarded the highest score, ‘100’, in each and every section. As specified in studies published by Francisca Puertas and on the journal’s own website, Materiales is listed in a number of national and international, specialised and general databases and indexes. Particularly worthy of mention are: the Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection, Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI) and Essential Science Indicators (ESI), Journal Citation Reports (JCR), Catálogo Latindex 2.0 and what seems like an endless list of others, including SCOPUS, CWTS Journal Indicators, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), specialised databases such as Chemical Abstracts, Ceramic Abstracts, Analytical Abstracts, Metadex, AATA Online (Getty Foundation), and general directories such as Ulrich’s, the Pascal and Dialnet. The history of Materiales de Construcción exemplifies the professionalisation of scientific publications in the academic ecosystem, in its persistent aspiration to consolidate and raise the quality and impact indicators of its articles. In 2021 Materiales became the first of Editorial CSIC’s 37 journals to specify each author’s specific contribution, positioning that information immediately prior to the list of references. That Materiales de Construcción has taken what in open access is known as the diamond route is a more than timely metaphor for its commitment to open publishing subject to no prior registration, lag time, reader, author or institutional fees or costs of whatsoever nature and its adoption of non-retributed peer review as a governing principle. The journal now faces the task of continuing to anticipate and channel innovation and rise to the challenges posed to the construction materials industry, guiding its efforts toward scientific-technological, socio-economic and environmental advancement and improvement under the Editorial CSIC seal. In acknowledgement of its exemplary track record and the documentary heritage accumulated over more than 70 years, all of the articles published from its inception to date have now been digitised and are available in open access mode on [https://materconstrucc.revistas.csic.es/index.php/materconstrucc/issue/archive].