Sustainability Webinar | 1st Sustainability Reviewer Club
the chair
25th Sustainability Webinar
1st Sustainability Reviewer Club
In the first quarter of this century, developments in science have highlighted the importance of understanding and describing complex systems. It has become clear that engaging with these systems requires connecting fragmented analytical knowledge. Highly specialized disciplines have so far been successful with reductionist approaches that rationally describe the functioning of specific components. However, it is increasingly apparent that complexity must be managed, not reduced, because it is the dynamic complexity of interactions governing a system that makes it more than the simple sum of its parts.Managing interdisciplinary integration is therefore crucial to scientific progress, as well as to designing suitable projects and handling outcomes. Communication among scientists and the dissemination of results are still at the very core of scientific progress as we know it. Although the ease and rapidity of communication and the number of ways that scientific knowledge can be disseminated have reached levels that were unimaginable just twenty years ago, the publication of scientific papers is still the fundamental means by which contributions to our common knowledge are recognized. Peer review is the ground on which all this stands. If interdisciplinary integration is the new challenge in many fields, it must also, therefore, be mastered by reviewers.
I think this webinar will offer helpful insights into managing the scientific dissemination of interdisciplinary research. I believe it will be of interest not only to young researchers but also to editors. I therefore thank the speakers of this webinar for contributing their thoughts and their much-appreciated experience on these stimulating novel issues
Date: 18 June 2026
Time: 2:30 p.m. CEST | 8:30 a.m. EDT | 8:30 p.m. CST Asia
Webinar ID: 858 1488 8778
Webinar Secretariat: journal.webinar@mdpi.com
Meet Our Chair
Department of Agricultural, Food, Environmental and Animal Sciences, University of Udine, Italy;Maria De Nobili is EiC of the section Soil Conservation and Sustainability for the MDPI journal Sustainability. She has recently retired from the position of Full Professor of Soil Science at the University of Udine where she lead the Environmental Functionality of Soils group, but she is still involved in active research. Current research interests include redox state of soil organic matter components and amelioration of saline soils by organic amendments.
Meet Our Speakers
School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, UK;As an Emeritus Professor of Political Thought, he is a part-time Senior Research Investigator responsible for supervising doctoral students and conducting research. His current research interest is in marine governance with a particular focus on fisheries management.
Department of Architecture, University of Naples Federico II, Italy;Dr. Federico Minelli, PhD, conducts research on building energy performance, HVAC systems, renewable energy integration, net-zero and zero-emission buildings, and multi-criteria decision-making methods for sustainable energy and building design. He has authored several scientific publications in the field of building physics and energy systems and actively contributes to international journals as a reviewer and other editorial roles.
In this section, you will find the recordings of this webinar to watch, re-watch and share with your colleagues!
Discussion started by chair sharing her insights to the importance of the review process and she thanked speakers for the presentations. Chair made sure that questions are in scope of the webinar as we received some questions completely out of scope and speakers couldn't respond to them (don't remember now exact questions but more general questions in sustainability/environment scope); Some questions I needed to take over from editorial side - such as how we choose the SI topics and why papers were desk-rejected (in this case out of scope...), there were few questions from authors some technical things like number of words before submitting, or formatting, etc.
We discussed the time period allowed to reviewers and in general importance of the rigorous peer-review as well how important is reviewing the papers from scholars' side and science in general. Chair and speakers also engaged and ask each other some questions/shared experience.
