As we embark on a new year at the helm of Transplant International (TI), the time has come to reflect on our journal’s activities and discuss some of the projects we wish to develop for 2025.

Several articles published in TI have aroused considerable attention, addressing various topics in the broad field of organ replacement. Congratulations to the authors who have submitted these papers and contributed to the maintenance of the high-quality standard of the journal (Table 1).

Four important special issues were completed in 2024: among them, “Living well after transplantation,” a collection focusing on various aspects that make quality of life so much improved after whole organ transplantation [12] and “Current challenges and advances on Infectious Diseases in Solid Organ Transplantation,” a timely series of articles as we exit the pandemic times that have had so much impact on our field [13].

Importantly, two of the completed special issues are the product of the tightened relationships between ESOT and TI editorial board:

1) An extensive collection on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in transplantation has been a significant realization of ESOT and TI commitment to the DEI values [14]. The articles published address a variety of issues that require immediate attention, from gender and race equity [15–17] to access to transplantations in underprivileged populations [18–20] or low or middle income countries [21, 22].

2) The long-awaited series of ESOT guidelines [23], written after a rigorous process during the Transplantation Learning Journey meeting held in Prague at the end of 2022 [24], are now fully available and range from oncological issues in liver transplantation [25, 26], to machine perfusion [27, 28] and biomarkers [29–31], and will undoubtedly be of regular utility and use for transplant surgeons and physicians.

All this publishing activity would not have been possible without our team of executive, associate and statistical editors, the staff at TI editorial office and the project manager from the ESOT office, Ms. Ketevan Rukhadze. Above all, the contribution of the reviewers who have spent their time and expertise to assess the papers submitted to our journal is gratefully acknowledged and we thank them for their work and voluntary participation to TI. The list of the reviewers who have contributed to TI in 2024 appears at the end of this editorial (Appendix A1).

Transplant International is proud to have started an editorial fellowship program, in which five young investigators, from different countries and professional background, have been closely associated with one of the editors-in-chief, to learn and assist in the editorial activities. In their final report, all have emphasized the educational value of the experience, the better understanding of the mechanisms of scientific publishing they got from it and the career progression it has represented for them. Editorial fellows were also engaged in communication projects for the journal and have been instrumental in creating or developing newsletters for the ESOT website, “tweetorials” and a live and interactive journal club, in which the authors and invited experts discuss selected articles recently published in TI. We have welcomed a new group of editorial fellows this past fall and we are excited to develop new projects with them. Meanwhile, we thank Chiara Becchetti, Saskia Bos, Fabian Eibensteiner, Mehdi Maanaoui and Tudor Moisoiu for their engagement and we wish them the great career in transplantation they deserve.

The biennial ESOT Congress will take place in London in 2025, from June 29 to July 2, and Transplant International will actively participate in the congress activities. Sessions designed and organized by the editorial board and editorial fellows will discuss some of the abstracts presented during the congress as well as a selection of articles recently published in TI and covering each of the five tracks defined by the scientific program committee. A “meet the editors” workshop, aiming at the younger delegates will discuss in an interactive format several aspects of scientific publication that are not always obvious for young investigators. Finally, we will publish toward the end of the year a collection of original articles based on the best communications presented at the congress.

2024 has been a busy and productive year, but more will come the way of TI readership in 2025. A collection on xenotransplantation is nearing completion and will be finalized in early 2025. We are preparing two new special issues on very hot topics in our field, namely, how transplantation practices must evolve to better serve an ageing population and the challenges and opportunities -and potential threats- of artificial intelligence when applied to our field.

From the beginning of our tenure, it has been our stated aim to knit tighter together the links between TI readership and ESOT membership. We hope that an ever-improving journal will contribute to these two communities realizing that they really are, or should be, the same and that we are stronger together in making the field of transplantation progress in Europe and beyond.