Dear Spinal Cord Reader,

As 2006 draws to a close, I am pleased to introduce the first of Spinal Cord's ‘bumper’ issues. Another one will follow in January 2007. The International Spinal Cord Society (ISCoS) Executive decided to produce these bumper issues in order to help clear the current backlog of articles waiting to be published in print in Spinal Cord, which has increased in recent months due to the level of high-quality research being submitted to the journal.

Pagination is a major issue for our journal as for others. Spinal Cord receives an increasing number of excellent submissions that obtain very positive comments from our reviewers. At the same time, Spinal Cord's pagination has not been, nor will it be, increased proportionately. To support our aim to publish as many high-quality articles in as short a time frame as possible, we have therefore recently revised Spinal Cord's Instructions to Authors to introduce stricter guidelines on article length. Our reasoning for this is two-fold: not only will it help us to publish more articles in each issue of the journal, thereby reducing our times to print, but experience has taught us that concise reports are generally more effective at communicating their message. For extensive studies, we recommend these are submitted to the journal in parts, so that each component of the study gets the attention it deserves – please contact the Spinal Cord Editorial Office if you have any questions about this before submission.

Please also note that all Spinal Cord articles are published in advance online (AOP) before being assigned to a print issue, ensuring that the final version of your paper is published as quickly as possible. I would urge you to browse our AOP site for recent articles:http://www.nature.com/sc/journal/vaop/ncurrent/index.html.

The December issue rounds off the year with several interesting manuscripts. The issue starts with an historical paper on Ollivier d'Angers, an unusual person who, in the beginning of the 19th century, spent most of his professional life studying the spinal cord marrow, or Medulla Spinalis, and published the first comprehensive treatise on the subject in 1824. This is followed by a helpful and informative review on spasticity assessment. There are several original studies dealing with different aspects of spinal cord management, including two manuscripts that discuss the Van Lieshout test. Two interesting case reports are also included.

We, at the Editorial Office, hope you enjoy reading the extra content in this bumper issue – we encourage the submission of Letters to the Editor as a means of commenting on some of the topical and more controversial studies published in the journal.

We would like to wish you all the best for the festive season and Happy New Year!