30th Annual International Mental Health Nursing Research Conference 2025

Date: 18-19 September 2025

Location: Oxford, United Kingdom

MDPI Attendees: Rebekah Paget, Isabel Nelson

Website: https://mhnauk.org/conference-1

In September, two of our MDPI UK colleagues, Isabel Nelson and Rebekah Paget, attended the 30^th annual International Mental Health Nursing Research conference at St. Catherine’s college, Oxford.

MDPI was the sole publisher sponsoring the conference, hosting a booth in collaboration with the following journals:

• Nursing Reports (ISSN 2039-4403)

• Behavioral Sciences (ISSN 2076-328X)

• Healthcare (ISSN 2227-9032)

• Psychiatry International (ISSN 2673-5318)

The booth attracted a diverse attendee profile, including mental health nursing lecturers, practicing NHS nurses, and multiple Editorial Board Members and authors. All booth visitors expressed their appreciation for MDPI’s active support of the conference, and Isabel and Rebekah were able to generate interest from multiple scholars to host Academic Publishing Workshops in the future.

As well as hosting the booth, we also ran an Academic Publishing Workshop for each day of the conference in collaboration with Nursing Reports, as part of our sponsorship for the conference.  

The workshops were primarily attended by senior academics and professors, during which a variety of topics were discussed, including MDPI’s Editorial Process from submission to publication.

Questions raised during the workshops included:

How do you establish when a reviewer report uses AI?

We train our Assistant Editors to recognise when reports are generated using AI. They are responsible for evaluating every review report that gets submitted for a paper. We also use internal AI detection tools created by the MDPI AI team to help the Assistant Editor in scanning for AI usage in reviewer reports.

Who makes decisions on the novelty of a paper?

Decisions about the novelty of a paper are made by the editorial board members of the journal to which the paper is submitted. They are external to MDPI and experts in the papers' fields.

How are APC funds used?

We often reinvest the profit made into disciplines with lower levels of funding, such as the

humanities. Aside from this, MDPI also has a number of initiatives designed to support the academic community including Preprints, MDPI Books, JAMS, Scilit, and more.

You can find out more about the services on offer by MDPI here: https://www.mdpi.com/about/initiatives

The conference was an excellent outreach opportunity for MDPI and the sponsor journals. We are grateful to all of the organisers who made the event possible, and look forward to continuing our close working relationship with them in the future.