As of January 2016, our Field Editor Etienne Hirsch moved up to become Associate Editor (AE) of Journal of Neural Transmission (JNT). As AE, he will share the Editor in Chief responsibilities with Peter Riederer, responsibilities such as further developing JNT’s strategy and organizational capacity to handle manuscripts with improved time schedules, and working to increase both the number of submissions and the scientific diversity and impact of our journal.

One of the projects that Etienne Hirsch has helped to launch is a new category of paper that we are terming “High Impact Reviews”. We invite distinguished scientists and researchers to contribute a state-of-the-art paper that deals with a present-day topic of significant interest to our readership. Etienne Hirsch will be responsible for all topics relating to “neurology” and Peter Riederer will be responsible for all topics relating to “psychiatry”.

We hope that this new category will encourage scientists to consider JNT for their publications and that their work in turn will be highly cited. In this issue, we start this new series and publish the first “High Impact Review”, a paper by Jellinger and Wenning.

We hope you find these papers both interesting and enlightening!

On a different note, we are proud to announce that our publisher Springer has now become part of Springer Nature. Springer Nature is one of the world’s leading global research, educational and professional publishers, created in May 2015 through the combination of Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Macmillan Education and Springer Science+Business Media. For more information, please visit http://www.springernature.com/.

Sincerely,

Peter Riederer and Etienne Hirsch