Sheikh Selim
Editor in Chief and Founder, The Oniket Bulletin
When I first conceived of The Oniket Bulletin (TOB, hereafter), the idea was a fairly stubborn one. Bangladesh, a country of unusual policy complexity, remarkable economic dynamism, and equally noteworthy public debate, did not have a dedicated, peer reviewed, weekly platform where that debate could be conducted with rigor, speed, and accessibility all at once.
Academic journals were valuable, but slow. Newspaper op eds were fast, but often thin on evidence. Social media commentary was faster still, and loud, but rarely peer reviewed and rarely bilingual. Somewhere between the seminar room and the newsroom, I sensed an empty seat. TOB was built to fill it.
Sixteen weeks in, I want to use this space to look back at what we set out to do, what we have actually done, and why I believe this project matters more with every passing week rather than less.
The Vision: A Bulletin, not a Journal, not a Newspaper
From the inception, the ambition was deliberately hybrid. TOB is not a conventional academic journal; Bangladesh’s policy debates cannot wait for an eighteen-month review cycle. Nor is it a newspaper; policy analysis deserves more discipline than a five-hundred-word column allows. It sits in between: short, peer reviewed, evidence-based articles published weekly on pressing policy questions, alongside blue-sky pieces tracing the government’s manifesto and development plans to their logical conclusions.
That second category, the blue-sky article, is something I am particularly attached to as founder. It is one thing to critique a policy failure after it has occurred. It is another to anticipate … based on stated government commitments, where reform is heading and where the gaps between ambition and implementation are likely to open up. We wanted the Bulletin to do both: hold a mirror to the present and a torch toward the future.
We organized this ambition across twelve policy areas, spanning agriculture, economy and policy governance, education, health, law and local governance, media and digital dissemination, politics and citizen rights, science and technology, sustainability and urban planning, trade and commerce, humanity and social welfare, and art, literature, history and national heritage.
This breadth was a conscious choice. Bangladesh’s policy challenges rarely respect disciplinary silos: a flood in the north reduces agricultural output, which strains trade balances, which erodes household welfare. A bulletin focused only on macroeconomics would miss this connective tissue, the chain that determines whether reforms succeed on the ground.
Genesis: Building a Peer Review Culture from Scratch
Founding a peer reviewed publication in sixteen weeks sounds reckless. Peer review is usually built over decades: editorial boards, reviewer networks, and reputations earned article by article. We lacked that luxury. What we had was clarity of purpose and two non-negotiables from week one: 1. every article would be reviewed for evidentiary rigor before publication, and 2. every article would be readable by a policymaker, journalist, student, and specialist alike, in the same sitting.
This meant building an editorial board and a reviewer pool essentially in parallel with publishing the first issues. It included setting terms and conditions, contributor eligibility criteria, and editorial principles that could withstand scrutiny, even as we were still learning what worked in practice. This dual construction, building the institution while simultaneously producing its output, was the right gamble to take. The alternative, waiting until every governance structure was fully in place before publishing a single article, would have cost us the very immediacy that makes the Bulletin useful.
The Unique Feature: Genuine Inclusivity in Policy Discourse
If there is one feature of TOB that I would ask readers to remember above all others, it is this: we made policy analysis on Bangladesh free, bilingual, and radically inclusive of who gets to contribute.
Free access matters because policy analysis that only reaches those who can pay for it, or those already inside elite institutional circles, fails at its most basic democratic function. A bulletin flagging a looming crisis in flood preparedness or food safety standards is only as useful as the number of people, officials, journalists, citizens, who can actually read it. We decided early that TOB would never sit behind a paywall.
Bilingual publication, in English and Bangla, is, to my knowledge, the first sustained attempt of its kind for a Bangladesh focused policy bulletin. This was not an aesthetic choice. A policy argument about comparative legislative frameworks, or the erosion of rights under income inequality, reaches a different audience depending on whether it is read in English by an international development partner (or an English medium student or graduate), or in Bangla by a district level administrator or a reader in Rajshahi or Barisal. We insisted on both, simultaneously, from the same editorial desk.
But the feature I am proudest of is authorship diversity. We opened our contributor pool to A level students at one end and to senior professors at the other, and placed them on the same platform, under the same editorial standards, discussing the same national questions. A student’s fresh eyes on a food quality crisis, or a professor’s decades of grounded expertise on institutional autonomy in higher education, are not competing forms of insight; they are complementary ones.
We further widened the pool across countries, age groups, and professional positions, inviting field experts beyond Bangladesh’s borders to weigh in on comparative questions … Bangladesh and India against shared development benchmarks, Bangladesh and Pakistan on rural economic productivity, Bangladesh and Nigeria on the gap between corruption perception and economic reality. The result is a comparative, cross generational, cross professional conversation that I do not believe exists anywhere else in Bangladesh’s policy media landscape today.
Crucially, this inclusivity extends beyond publication itself. Our LinkedIn group, which I have the privilege of leading directly as editor in chief, functions as a live extension of the Bulletin’s pages. Authors do not simply publish and disappear; they engage with readers, respond to challenges, and, in several cases, refine their thinking in public view. Policy debate, conducted this way, becomes a visible and participatory process, not a finished product handed down from on high.
Coverage and Output: Sixteen Weeks in Numbers
Over sixteen weeks of continuous weekly publication, TOB has produced a steadily growing body of peer reviewed short articles, distributed across all twelve of our policy categories. Readers browsing our archive will find several articles running concurrently in any given week: an economic governance piece alongside a health policy piece, a trade analysis alongside a piece on national heritage. This consistency of output, week after week without interruption, is itself noteworthy for a publication built from the ground up in under four months.
Our authorship base has grown in tandem with our output, drawing contributors from across academic ranks and professional sectors, and, notably, from beyond Bangladesh itself. Each article carries a named author and a clear category classification, and each is released under an open license that permits reuse, a decision that maximizes the circulation of the ideas we publish well beyond our own platform.
Engagement and Impact: Beyond the Page
Numbers on a page mean little if they do not translate into real world traction, and this is where the Bulletin’s first sixteen weeks have exceeded even my own expectations. Engagement on LinkedIn has grown steadily, with articles regularly generating discussion threads that extend the analysis well past the original text. More significant still, several articles have been picked up and referenced in national dailies, a clear signal that the Bulletin is being taken seriously as a source of policy framing.
Most gratifying has been evidence of government follow up tied directly to issues our authors first flagged in these pages. When an article raises a concern about food safety, UNSDG, flood preparedness, institutional governance, or a gap between manifesto commitments and implementation, and that concern is later taken up in public discourse or acted upon administratively, the Bulletin has done precisely what it was designed to do.
Looking Ahead
Bangladesh stands (as it so often does) at a moment of genuine consequence: economically ambitious, politically evolving, and administratively strained by the sheer pace of the changes it is managing. In such a moment, the space between government intention and government delivery is exactly where careful, evidence based, rapidly produced policy analysis earns its keep. TOB exists to occupy that space, not to replace the work of ministries, universities, or the press. It provides a connective platform where analysis produced by all of them, and by engaged citizens besides, can meet, be scrutinized, and be acted upon.
Sixteen weeks is a modest span in the life of an institution. But I would ask readers to judge us not by the calendar but by the pattern: consistent weekly publication, rigorous peer review built in real time, free and bilingual access, and an authorship pool that spans generations and borders. That pattern is the true measure of what we have built, and it is the foundation on which we intend to keep building.
To every author who has trusted us with their first submission, every reader who has engaged with an argument in our LinkedIn group, and every policymaker who has taken a flagged concern seriously, thank you. TOB’s story is only sixteen weeks old. I look forward to writing its next chapter with you.
