The Scandinavian Journal of Statistics is internationally recognised as one of the leading statistical journals in the world. It was founded in 1974 by four Scandinavian statistical societies. Today more than eighty per cent of the manuscripts are submitted from outside Scandinavia.It is an international journal devoted to reporting significant and innovative original contributions to statistical methodology, both theory and applications.The journal specializes in statistical modelling showing particular appreciation of the underlying substantive research problems.The emergence of specialized methods for analysing longitudinal and spatial data is just one example of an area of important methodological development in which the Scandinavian Journal of Statistics has a particular niche.