Welcome to Volume 4

Welcome to 2016, and to Volume 4 of the Business Ethics Journal Review. Volume 4 signals that we are now in our 4th year of publication. The fact that our experiment in shaking up academic business ethics publication is still running at this point is encouraging, in an era in which online publishing still hasn’t entirely taken hold in academia.

2015 saw a number of exciting events for BEJR. In early 2015, the editors founded the Journal Review Foundation, a non-profit corporation that now acts as BEJR’s publisher. This move helps to ensure a stable future for BEJR, and provides a legal entity to own BEJR’s intellectual property in perpetuity. The Foundation also provides a framework within which to expand activities beyond BEJR. Within the next month, the Foundation will be publishing a book (a collection of essays on social justice), and we are currently in talks regarding starting a second journal.

The editors also founded, in March of 2015, Business Ethics Highlights, a news and opinion aggregator, which has so far received tremendous feedback. In order to highlight how useful BEH could be in the classroom, we also published two relevant guides: “How Instructors Can Use Business Ethics Highlights” and “How Students Can Use Business Ethics Highlights.”

2015 also marked our first formal appearance at the annual meeting of the Society for Business Ethics. The Journal Review Foundation (and naturally BEJR) had a table in the “book room” at SBE, and co-editor Chris MacDonald used the opportunity to hand out printed copies of BEJR commentaries and to explain BEJR’s distinctive model to attendees.

So far, it looks like 2016 is off to a good start: the editors have a number of items in the pipeline, and our first Commentary of the year — a commentary on a recently-published book — will go online within a week. So stay tuned!