About Ciencia Hoy

Ciencia Hoy

Ciencia Hoy is an Argentine magazine of scientific and technological popularisation published in Buenos Aires by the Asociación Civil Ciencia Hoy, a non-profit civil association founded in 1988 for that purpose. Its first issue, number 1, appeared in December 1988–January 1989. It is a bimonthly magazine written principally by researchers themselves, in which Argentine scientists and technologists explain their own work and the state of their fields to a general reader. It was modelled, with direct support, on the Brazilian magazine Ciência Hoje, founded by Brazilian scientists on the same principle, and the two shared a common format to facilitate the exchange of articles. Unlike the commercial popular-science magazines launched in Argentina in the same years, which rose and fell with the market, Ciencia Hoy has continued publishing for more than three and a half decades with the support of public subsidies, becoming Argentina's leading general science magazine and one of the longest-lived science popularisation projects in Latin America.

The Asociación Civil Ciencia Hoy, founded 1988

The magazine cannot be separated from the association that publishes it. The Asociación Civil Ciencia Hoy was constituted in 1988, in Buenos Aires, with the stated objectives of disseminating the current state and advances of Argentina's scientific and technological production; promoting scientific exchange with the rest of Latin America through dissemination of the region's scientific and technological work; stimulating public interest in science and culture; editing a periodical that would spread the work of Argentine and Latin American scientists and technologists across the formal, natural and social sciences and their technological applications; promoting the creation of an academic teleinformatics network for researchers; organising and participating in conferences and meetings for the dissemination of Rioplatense science; and collaborating and exchanging information with similar associations in other countries. The association's seat is on Avenida Corrientes in Buenos Aires, and among its other achievements it was responsible for RETINA, the Red Teleinformática Académica, an early academic network for Argentine researchers. The magazine is the association's central and enduring instrument.

Modelled on Brazil's Ciência Hoje

Ciencia Hoy was created by a group of Argentine scientists inspired by the then successful Brazilian model of Ciência Hoje, the magazine of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science. The Revista Ciencias of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, reporting the Argentine launch at the time, recorded that the project was the product of Argentina's scientists, supported by the team of Ciência Hoje of Brazil, sharing a common format in order to facilitate the exchange of articles. The founding editors presented the magazine as an organ of diffusion of science and also as a space for reflection, opinion and debate, which would include permanent sections of news, interviews and comments, with its pages open to the scientific community wishing to express itself and interact with society as a whole. They declared a commitment to the reader to democratise culture: the non-specialist reader, or the scientist of another discipline, would be informed not only of the progress of universal science but would have a living panorama of local activity. The magazine was to be interdisciplinary and pluralist, though, in its editors' words, not ethically neutral.

First issues, December 1988 onward

Number 1 of Ciencia Hoy, dated December 1988–January 1989, set the pattern: articles titled Los relojes biológicos (“Biological clocks”), Superconductividad (“Superconductivity”), El rastro de los Groebélidos, Aborto (“Abortion”) and Anfibios del Delta (“Amphibians of the Delta: strategies of reproduction”). The following issues of the first volume treated, among many other subjects, who killed the megatherium, the Chagas disease report, the architecture of neurons, inflation and hyperinflation, the ecological question, red tides, historical biogeography, extraterrestrial intelligence, Galileo and the effects of size, the canoe peoples of the far south, Patagonia, the pre-Hispanic northwest, quantum Hall effect, DNA, atmospheric ozone and acid rain. The range was deliberate and has remained characteristic: physics and biology beside history, economics and archaeology, all of it written at a level its editors described as high popularisation — alta divulgación — in the style of the older Argentine tradition of Ciencia e Investigación, and distinct from the lighter formula of the commercial newsstand science magazines.

Written by researchers

The defining editorial rule of Ciencia Hoy is that its articles are written by researchers. The magazine is not staffed by journalists rewriting press releases; its authors are the scientists and scholars who do the work, edited so that a reader of another discipline — or of none — can follow them. A recent issue's masthead illustrates the structure: an editor-in-chief drawn from the research community, responsible editors from institutes of the University of Buenos Aires, CONICET and the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences, and a scientific council of the association. Number 183, for December 2022–January 2023, carried articles on marine fauna and the human being at the end of the world, the football World Cup and the Argentine phenotype, language in the brain, and horses and unicorns — the mixture of natural science, social science and cultural reflection that the magazine has sustained since 1989. Its articles are routinely used in Argentine schools and universities, and its archive functions as a survey, written from inside, of what Argentine science has done across four decades.

The golden triennium and the commercial contrast

Ciencia Hoy appeared in a brief boom of Argentine popular science. Between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s, commercial houses launched the monthly magazines Muy Interesante in 1985, Descubrir in 1989 and Conozca Más in 1989. In what the editor De Vedia called the golden triennium, 1991 to 1993, those three commercial titles together reached an average monthly circulation of 450,000 copies, an unusual figure for such products in Argentina. The trend did not last: within five years the figure had fallen drastically, by about 75 percent, through economic pressures and the growth of science popularisation in newspapers and cable television. Descubrir and Conozca Más disappeared from the market, and the local edition of Muy Interesante was eventually replaced by the Mexican edition in 2007. Ciencia Hoy, by contrast, continued — studies of Argentine science communication note the contrast explicitly — because its non-profit structure and public subsidy freed it from the newsstand economics that killed its commercial contemporaries. The comparison defines the magazine: it survived not by outselling the market but by being organised outside it.

Contents and fields covered

The association's own statutes define the magazine's field as the formal, natural and social sciences and their technological applications, and its back catalogue bears that out. Historical selections gathered for its anniversary issues include the transformation of the Argentine countryside, poverty among Argentines, urban waste management, nanomaterials created in Argentina, marine biology, vaccination as public policy, genetics and precision medicine, lithium as a strategic resource, the history and its polemics, the neural circuits of music, and the use of big-data algorithms to measure poverty and development. Its dedicated thematic numbers have included issues on the ocean sciences. The magazine has never been a bulletin of a single discipline or institution: a geologist, a sociologist, a historian and a biologist could appear in the same issue, each addressing the same general reader. That catholicity, in the secular sense, is what qualifies it as a general science magazine rather than a specialised journal, and why it is described in the verified record as Argentina's leading title of its kind.

Thirty years and the UNTREF chapter

In 2018 Ciencia Hoy celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, with a ceremony at the C3 Cultural Centre of Science in the Palermo scientific-technological pole in Buenos Aires, at which the Secretary of Government for Science, Lino Barañao, congratulated the magazine on behalf of the national science authorities. The association's objectives, restated on that occasion, remained those of 1988: to disseminate the state and advances of Argentine scientific and technological production, to promote scientific exchange with Latin America, and to stimulate public interest in science. In a later chapter of its history, the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, UNTREF, assumed academic tutelage of the publication, guaranteeing free and open access to all its contents. The first number edited under UNTREF, number 192, paid homage to the magazine's trajectory by gathering a selection of historical articles reflecting its thematic diversity and its commitment to transferring knowledge to society, and the university made every number, from the first of December 1988 to the most recent, available through its site. The move secured, in UNTREF's words, the survival of a magazine fundamental for scientific dissemination in Argentina.

Access, address and availability

Ciencia Hoy is published by the Asociación Civil Ciencia Hoy from its seat at Avenida Corrientes 2835, Buenos Aires, and its official site is cienciahoy.org.ar, the website recorded in the verified directory data for this profile. Its issues are consultable through the magazine's own archive, which lists every volume from number 1 of December 1988–January 1989 onward, and through the UNTREF edition with free access. Its standing in Argentine science communication is also recorded in international surveys: the All-Atlantic Ocean Research and Innovation Alliance lists Ciencia Hoy among its initiatives for its dissemination of Argentine scientific and technological production and its dedicated numbers on ocean sciences, and academic histories of science communication in Argentina treat it as the field's durable institution, the nonprofit survivor of the 1980s boom.

Significance

The significance of Ciencia Hoy is a matter of institutional endurance in a field of short lives. Argentine popular science produced brilliant and brief magazines before it — Más Allá in the 1950s lasted four years — and produced bigger-selling magazines alongside it that vanished within a decade. Ciencia Hoy proposed a different model, in which the scientific community itself, organised as a civil association, would publish its own account of its work indefinitely, written by researchers, edited for everyone, and sustained by public support rather than by advertising or cover price alone. More than three and a half decades after December 1988, with its complete archive freely available and its tutelage secured by a public university, that model has been vindicated by survival. For a directory of Argentine magazines, Ciencia Hoy is the country's principal living science magazine, and the clearest Argentine example of popularisation understood, in the phrase of one of its field's pioneers, as the continuation of science by other means.