The journal is a joint publication of BEI, Bangladesh Development Studies Initiative (BDI), a platform for expatriate Bangladeshis in the USA, and Services for Professional Education and Enterprise Development (SPEED), a concern of Scholastica Group.

Three issues of JBS will be published a year with scholarly articles from academics, experts, and practitioners in various fields concerning Bangladesh, the publishers said.

While presiding over the ceremony, BEI President Farooq Sobhan said the initiative envisages bridging the gap between the academics in Bangladesh and those in the Unites States of America (USA) to promote cross-fertilisation of ideas.

He hoped that the launching of the journal would encourage academic institutions to come forward to help these three organisations to reach out to a wider cross section of people, and attract local academics to contribute to this very prestigious peer reviewed journal. This would also in turn encourage the exchange of knowledge and expertise.

JBS will fulfill the very niche for peer-reviewed journals, said former adviser to the caretaker government and Chairperson of Scholastica Group Yasmeen Murshed.

There is no dearth of ideas and opinions but it is time to take a forward step towards academic analysis from mere opinion sharing.

"Bringing out the journal has been an uphill battle four us," Professor Syed Saad Andaleeb, programme chair, Marketing, Black School of Business: Pennsylvania State University, USA and also editor of the journal, said.

In the programme he also discussed the various challenges he faced in bringing out the journal, including the quality of the articles that were turned in.

Speakers at the seminar said that, to address this lack of expertise to produce scholarly articles, local universities must take the lead to improve the quality of research in Bangladesh, and turn the universities to knowledge generation centres rather than only knowledge dissemination centres.

Manzoor Ahmed, director, Institute of Educational Development of BRAC University, Abul Hasan Chowdhury, former state minister for foreign affairs and Dr S Ferhat Anwar, a professor at the Institute of Business Administration of Dhaka University, also attended the seminar.