Following the exciting and innovative talks, posters and discussions at MCMski IV, the editor of Statistics and Computing, Mark Girolami (who also happens to be the new president of the BayesComp section of ISBA, which is taking over the management of future MCMski meetings), kindly proposed to publish a special issue of the journal open to all participants to the meeting. Not only to speakers, mind, but to all participants.

So if you are interested in submitting a paper to this special issue of a computational statistics journal that is very close to our MCMski themes, I encourage you to do so. The deadline for submissions is set on March 15 (a wee bit tight but we would dearly like to publish the issue in 2014, namely the same year as the meeting.) Submissions are to be made through the Statistics and Computing portal, with a mention that they are intended for the special issue.

An editorial committee chaired by Antonietta Mira and composed of Christophe Andrieu, Brad Carlin, Nicolas Chopin, Jukka Corander, Colin Fox, Nial Friel, Chris Holmes, Gareth Jones, Peter Müller, Antonietta Mira, Geoff Nicholls, Gareth Roberts, Havard Rue, Robin Ryder, and myself, will examine the submissions and get back within a few weeks to the authors. In a spirit similar to the JRSS Read Paper procedure, submissions will first be examined collectively, before being sent to referees. We plan to publish the reviews as well, in order to include a global set of comments on the accepted papers. We intend to do it in The Economist style, i.e. as a set of edited anonymous comments. Usual instructions for Statistics and Computing apply, with the additional requirements that the paper should be around 10 pages and include at least one author who took part in MCMski IV.