In 1920, Santiago Ramón y Cajal founded the Institute that bears his name with a conviction that for him carried the force of an axiom: scientific knowledge cannot be private property. Science that is not shared is not science; it is accumulation. The researcher who conceals their data is not investigating; they are speculating. This conviction beats today with renewed force at the heart of the organism Cajal helped to build.

The Spanish National Research Council has just brought forth, through its Institute for Advanced Social Studies (IESA-CSIC), the first national scientific information infrastructure built exclusively on open sources and identifiers. It is called Sílice — Sistema de Información sobre la Literatura Científica Española — and it represents, in Cajal’s language, not merely a tool but a doctrine: the doctrine that the sovereignty of Spanish scientific knowledge can no longer remain hostage to external corporate interests.

Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados IESA-CSIC

The Problem Cajal Could Not Solve

Cajal published in Spanish journals when nobody read them and in German journals when nobody in Spain supported him. He understood before almost anyone else that the visibility of science is not an aesthetic luxury but a condition of its existence. A century later, the problem persists: major commercial databases — Web of Science, Scopus — operate, as Sílice’s principal investigator José Luis Ortega notes, under logics similar to those of a stock market, prioritising journal profitability over scientific and social impact.

Sílice was built to break this circle.

The Architecture of Independence

The system acts as an aggregation node for the most powerful sources in the open science movement: OpenAlex, a free and massive catalogue of academic documents; Crossref, the essential bibliographic source for publication metadata; ORCID, the open registry ensuring unambiguous identification of researchers; and ROR (Research Organization Registry), providing persistent identifiers for all research organisations.

The result is a database already exceeding 3 million publications, 40 million citations and profiles for 117,000 Spanish authors, accessible through a web interface and an API for large-scale analysis.

Responsible Metrics: Cajal’s Legacy Against the Impact Factor

Sílice adheres to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), prioritising metrics that value intrinsic quality and social impact over citation counts. It is framed within the National Open Science Strategy 2023-2027.

The CSIC as Custodian of Two Legacies

The CSIC custodies the Cajal Legacy — the 1,800 original drawings, the 17,150 histological preparations, the correspondence, the microscopes, the Nobel medal — and now brings forth Sílice, ensuring that Spanish science of the present and future is equally accessible and free.

“Open infrastructures are fundamental tools for the independence of scientific research,” the IESA-CSIC affirms. Don Santiago, who spent half his life fighting for that independence with a camera, a microscope and a pen, could not have said it better.

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