Reflections from the 2025 MDPI UK Summit

On 17^th September 2025, MDPI UK hosted its second bi-annual summit at the Hilton London Olympia, welcoming 21 UK Editors-in-Chief and two Associate Editors.

Each summit provides our UK-based Editorial Board Members with an opportunity to hear about the latest developments in the UK office and beyond, as well as offering a space for productive discussions surrounding the latest topics in academic publishing, such as the changing landscape for reviewers and the importance of indexing journals in a variety of databases.

During the event, we heard from five MDPI staff, including our CEO Stefan Tochev, Manchester Office Manager Jaime Anderson, Scientific Quality Advisor Lead Dr. Michael O’Sullivan, Research Integrity Specialist Daisy Fenton, and Institutional Partnerships Manager Becky Castellon.

Founding Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of NDT, Prof. Fabio Tosti, from the University of West London, also delivered a presentation exploring promotion and development techniques of his journal as an example for other EiCs. It was incredibly useful to hear firsthand the successful methods used by him to maintain and develop the journal.

Stefan opened the day’s proceedings with a presentation reflecting on the development of MDPI and MPDI UK over the past year, paying special attention to the 2024 statistics surrounding open access compared with subscription-based publications. At the end of the day, Jaime built on these foundations by presenting the ways in which we have been engaging the UK Academic Community over the last year, and detailed our outreach plans for the upcoming months. In particular, she focused on the increase in events that are to take place in 2026 and beyond.

Dr. Michael O'Sullivan delivered two presentations throughout the course of the summit. The first explained MDPI's Editorial Process, building on the updates to the process in the last year. His presentation had a particular focus on the importance of the peer review process within MDPI and in the wider scholarly publishing community. He also took our academics through the AI tools currently being used by MDPI to help streamline the editorial process, including our image falsification detection tool Proofig AI. His second presentation explored the role of Indexing in academic publishing, and highlighted the ways in which we are working for our journals within MDPI's Indexing team.

Becky Castellon, our Institutional Partnerships Manager, delivered a presentation introducing MDPI's Institutional Open Access Program, as well as the benefits and limitations of Transformative Agreements. Research Integrity Specialist Daisy Fenton also gave a presentation on the core principles of Research Integrity and Publication Ethics, once again relating it back to MDPI's practices.

Thanks to the insightful contributions from all of our speakers, we were able to foster a productive discussion environment both during the Q&As and into the networking sessions. Following on from the summit, we have received a lot of positive feedback from the attendees, who felt that the event was well organized, informative, and interactive.

We look forward to hosting more events like this in the coming months, and want to extend our sincere thanks to all of the staff and Editorial Board Members who made this summit possible.