guest article by Rebekah Russell-Bennett
It was a balmy afternoon in Maastricht and at the end of a cobbled lane, service scholars gathered to celebrate the 30th birthday of the Journal of Services Marketing (JSM) in style.
As a prelude to the welcome reception of the SERVSIG 2016 Conference, a small gathering of editorial board members and invited guests met to share coffee and cake and talk about the friendships and research excellence associated with JSM. JSM was founded in 1987 by Robert A Grayson as an academic journal written for practitioners. In 1990 the editorship was handed to Charles Martin who introduced reviews for all revisions to be done by the same reviewer (previously each resubmission was reviewed by a new reviewer!). In the early 1990s the rejection rates were approximately 45% due to the small number of service scholars and has now reduced to 19%. Since 2005, when the journal went online, there have been 3.3 million downloads of JSM articles with services research reaching the four corners of the globe.
In 2014, the journal entered a new era with editors Steve Baron and Rebekah Russell-Bennett coming on board with a team of associate editors.
Rebekah Russell-Bennett
Marketing Professor at Queensland University of Technology
