We had the opportunity to interview Prof. Dr. Ben Clegg, Editor-in-Chief of Systems (ISSN: 2079-8954), at the 2025 MDPI UK Summit in London.

Prof. Dr. Clegg is a professor of operations management and systems thinking at Aston University in Birmingham, UK. He received his PhD in process-oriented holonic (PrOH) modelling in 1999, culminating in one of the first published works within the field. He has since published widely on PrOH modelling and operations management improvement, and has worked in various application areas, including manufacturing, engineering, construction, rail services, legal services, and education services.

Prof. Dr. Clegg first joined Aston in 2003 as a lecturer, before progressing to the roles of senior lecturer in 2006 and professor in 2014. He has been the lead thinker and instigator behind the novel PrOH Modelling Methodology (see prohmodel.org) developed at the university, as well as a key player in the growth and development of the Aston Business School.

In his work, Prof. Dr. Clegg uses theoretical ideas, such as systems thinking and multi-organisation enterprise management, to provide organisations with practical solutions. His industry-based projects have been co-funded by the ESRC, EPSRC, and Innovate UK’s Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs).

Prof. Dr. Clegg’s KTP project with Midlands-based law firm Higgs LLP was a huge success, receiving an “Outstanding” rating from Innovate UK. With it, and other similar projects, he became a finalist at the European Foundation for Management Development Excellence in Practice Awards, and the subject of Aston University’s impact case submissions to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014 and 2021.

Prof. Dr. Clegg is a chartered engineer as well as a fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) and a member of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), European Operations Management Association (EurOMA), British Academy of Management (BAM), and Operational Research Society. He has published approximately 200 outputs across various top journals and has a leading textbook on Operations Management published with McGraw Hill Education.

In January of this year, Prof. Dr. Clegg was appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of the MDPI journal Systems. In our interview at the 2025 MDPI UK Summit, we spoke about his role as Editor-in-Chief, his plans for Systems going forward, and his perspective on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on peer review.

Please find our interview with Prof. Dr. Ben Clegg below.

1. What drew you to the role of Editor-in-Chief?
Well, I’ve always worked in systems thinking and systems analysis. I did a PhD in systems thinking back in the 90s, and in the last 20 to 30 years, I’ve applied it to organisational problems, operations management, supply chains, innovation, technology adoption, and more.
The role of Editor-in-Chief is something I haven’t done before, and I thought that at this stage of my career I could make a real contribution to it. I’ve been asked to do it in other journals before, but I said no because I felt they weren’t right for me; my heart wasn’t in it.

2. What have you got planned for Systems?
Well, what I would really like to do is make the journal more well-known within the academic community. MDPI is a relatively new publisher and an open access publisher.
I think there’s a lot of snobbishness and old-fashioned mentality about open access journals, but traditional publishing and open access publishing are going to be muddied in the future and have more crossover. I think that traditional journals will make everything open access, because that’s what academics want. Otherwise, their papers don’t count in research assessment exercises, unless their institutions pay for that, and it’s not cheap.
There’s no magic bullet to this transition. It's partly about reputation, but it’s also about getting the right people on editorial boards and about getting well-known people published in the journal. It’s about branding, going to conferences, hosting stalls at conferences, etc.

3. What has been the biggest challenge you have faced coming into the role?
The subject matter of Systems is solid and essential to what people do. However, when I go to conferences and tell people that I’m Editor-in-Chief of Systems, they ask me why I chose to do it. I tell them why, and I see they are sceptical about open access journals. Unperturbed, I explain how I believe things will change, and I honestly believe people’s opinions will improve towards open access journals; they will have to change or get left behind. It might take 5 or 10 years, but you’ve just got to keep on promoting new ways of publishing. The concept of open access publishing needs more socialising and bringing into the mainstream to address authors’ concerns.

4. How do you think MDPI’s team has helped support your transition into the role?
I think they’ve been first class, really! I’ve been blown away by the efficiency of the China office and of Jamie Zhang. Our timing arrangement works nicely. If I allocate the first hour of my day to my Systems work, they’re just finishing the last hour of their day. There is the perfect crossover. Initially, correspondence was about the onboarding and all that kind of stuff. I had a meeting with the whole team in China when I first started. It was great. Ongoing, operationally, I’ve had responses within the hour and certainly within the day, which has been fantastic.

5. Why do you think it’s important for us to host events such as the MDPI UK Summits?
The big publishers, in my experience, never do anything like this. You never meet with anybody from your own journal, let alone other journals. This is a very clever way of bringing people in. You only get to talk to people at conferences, and conferences are subject-specific, so you never get to meet new people from other disciplines.

6. Why do you think it’s important to ensure we have a quality peer review and publication process?
The fact that MDPI has an efficient production team and a great publication system, and doesn’t compromise on quality, is a great selling point. In the academic world, people believe the longer a paper takes to process, the better the quality of the publication will be. But that is not the case. Often, it takes a long time because it’s just sat in someone’s inbox for six months, and they haven’t looked at it.

7. What do you think is the value of peer review, speaking as an Editor-in-Chief, author, and reviewer?
To be a credible journal, you absolutely need to demonstrate that you’re doing a thorough peer review, which means you must have had at least two expert reviewers looking at every manuscript. Sometimes, though, peer review can be hit-and-miss, as you can get all sorts of reviewers. Training and correctly incentivising reviewers will be an important part of moving to a successful open access publishing model. Reviewers so often focus on what’s not in the paper, and they criticise it for what isn’t in it. And that’s wrong. No work is perfect; no paper is perfect, and reviewers shouldn’t expect perfection. Limitations and further work should, of course, always be well explained in papers by the authors.

8. The theme of this year’s Peer Review Week explored the ways in which AI has influenced how we do peer review. How do you think AI has influenced peer review so far, and how do you think AI is going to influence scholarly publishing going forward?
You can’t stop AI from being used, and it’s wrong to try and stop it from being used. But what authors need to do is to acknowledge how AI is used and what it has been used to generate. I think there should be a section in a paper, at some point, maybe a footnote, about how AI was used, how it wasn’t, and a percentage of that paper that was generated by AI. And then you must make a judgment call about what is acceptable and what isn’t. The challenge is that AI can also be used without us realising it. So, I think we need to be very careful of that, and there needs to be simple guidelines for its use. Then choose to use it or choose not to use it. If you choose to use it, say how.
My deep fear is that AI will produce increasingly less original work. And by that, I mean fewer original ideas. As we know, AI skims through what has already been published, so it currently can’t generate authentically original ideas. AI is not capable of original thought. As a final note of caution, even the term AI itself is misleading, as it’s not artificial intelligence at all; it’s just a very powerful computer processing.