The Journal of European Periodical Studies (JEPS) had been in the making for quite a while before the first issue appeared in the summer of 2016. Like any good crime, it needed motive, means and opportunity. The motive was established early on. The idea that ESPRit needed a journal of its own had been very much on the minds of the core group members ever since their 2009 meeting in Nijmegen, when the broader plans for the society were first laid out. The means, however, were a different story. A journal requires infrastructure (editors, a publisher, typesetter, a publishing platform, etc.) and two of the most precious academic resources: time and money. ESPRit had a committed circle of supporters, but its funds were (and still are) modest and the question “Who’s going to actually do it?” was left hanging for a while.
Opportunity finally presented itself in 2013, though somewhat tentatively at first. On 1‒2 March, the core group organised a meeting at the University of Salford. My colleague Marysa Demoor was unable to attend, so we agreed that I would go instead. On the agenda of the second day was, among other things, “2.45-3.30pm Journal and other publications”. I talked about Ghent University’s involvement in the burgeoning open-access movement, which at the time was beginning to reshape the landscape of scholarly publishing. The idea of an “in-house” journal that would bypass commercial publication models was met with approval, and it was decided that I would look into the practicalities further.
The following weeks, emails went back and forth about what the new journal should be called, how often it would appear, whether we would have book reviews, how to apply for an ISSN, and what support the Ghent University Library could offer us if we chose to host the journal through Open Journals System. Still, it took another two years, and my own transition from postdoc uncertainty to a more stable tenure-track position, before the journal finally took shape. In my mailbox for this period I still have a series of emails with successive drafts of the journal’s mission statement attached and brainstorms about the composition of the editorial board, along with responses from Kristin Ewins, Usha Wilbers and Matthew Philpotts happily agreeing to join the smaller editorial team responsible for the day-to-day running of the journal, with Jasper Schelstraete taking charge of all things digital. At Kristin’s suggestion, we found a fabulous and extraordinarily patient typesetter in Pat Fitzgerald, the only paid contributor to the journal and the person who would prepare the proofs for almost a decade, until her retirement in 2026.
For the inaugural issue, we were able to assemble a wonderfully varied line-up of articles on Dutch, Swedish, British and American periodicals by Fionnuala Dillane, Tilda Maria Forselius, Brian Maidment, Helleke van den Braber, Celia Aijmer Rydsjö, AnnKatrin Jonsson and Laurel Brake. In a fitting irony, perhaps, we hadn’t quite worked our way through the first set of proofs when the UK voted to leave the European Union. Still familiarising ourselves with our, as it turned out to be, woefully inadequate style sheet, we went through another four sets before we finally published the issue. Ten years later, with a better style sheet, a new editorial team and Cedric Van Dijck as editor-in-chief, the journal still flourishes thanks to transnational teamwork and, of course, the rich transnational archive that periodicals constitute in and of themselves.
