Murky Science

Here below an update (April 22, 2024) on the situation of Investigación y Ciencia, the Spanish version of Scientific American. Springer Nature bought the magazine, then closed the journal and … deleted all the archives. Almost fifty years of publications. Gone. Science and marketing have different interests. Apparently, Springer Nature does not have the deep commitment to science it claims to have in its attractive web pages. The brazenness of such open hypocrisy suggests a feudal system. Probably, we should begin planning a direct boycott of those companies promoting a murky business with science. And, in this sense, researchers may have a crucial role. Here the update, from the former editorial team at Investigación y Ciencia and Mente y Cerebro:

“Shortly after the publication of this open letter in April 2023, the science magazine Mètode, published by the University of Valencia, offered to host the complete digital archive of http://www.investigacionyciencia.es on its own website to make it freely available to the public. It was a non-profit initiative that didn’t involve the appropriation of any publishing rights, as it would have preserved all licenses held by Springer Nature—the publishing group that owned Investigación y Ciencia and Mente y Cerebro, the one that decided to close them in 2023, and the legal owner of their digital archive, which has since remained inaccessible.

Although Springer Nature initially seemed receptive to Mètode’s offer and took the first steps to assess its technical and legal feasibility, shortly after the company abruptly ended talks.

Since then, and throughout the last year, Springer Nature and Scientific American have ignored all our attempts to resume the issue—without ever responding to our requests, or without ever explaining their rejection of a proposal that, once the archive had been transferred, would have entailed zero costs for them and would have given 500 million Spanish speakers free access to a scientific and cultural heritage of more than 21,000 articles and half a century of history.

During this time we have become aware of some individual initiatives to provide access to the print archive of Investigación y Ciencia. While we certainly welcome such efforts, they are unrelated to our original request—the full and official release by Springer Nature of the entire archive of all magazines (Investigación y Ciencia, Mente y Cerebro, Temas, Cuadernos and Especial), as well as the thousands of science news and blog articles published over the years at www.investigacionyciencia.es.

With its silence, Springer Nature has chosen to ignore a non-profit and extremely credible proposal that would have been of enormous benefit to the global Spanish-speaking community. A proposal that was supported by 11 scientific institutions, by more than 550 scientists and science communication professionals, and by more than 11,000 signatories at change.org.

We would like to express our most sincere thanks to all of them, as well as to the science magazine Mètode, the Spanish Association of Science Communication and, of course, to the countless readers and authors who, for 47 years, made possible one of the most impactful science communication projects in the Spanish-speaking world.”