This special issue of the Journal on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications includes revised versions of selected papers that were presented at two international events we organized during 2013 and 2014.

The first event was the 10th edition of the International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods: Formal Aspects of Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing (WS-FM 2013). The event was held in Beijing (China) on August 29–30, 2013. Its proceedings were published in the volume 8379 of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

The second event was the 1st edition of the special session on FORmal approaches to PArallel and Distributed systems (4PAD 2014). This event was held in Torino (Italy) on February 12, 2014. Its proceedings were published in a volume of the IEEE Computer Society.

This joint special issue was motivated by one of the common themes of both events, which is the aim of bringing together researchers working on formal methods and distributed systems based on the service-oriented computing paradigm. We believe that this is an important theme due to the proliferation of such software systems and their use in critical activities in our society such as e-governance, e-health and e-commerce, which necessarily need formal assurances of their trustworthiness. We think that the contributions in this volume constitute a valuable example of current research in this direction.

Among all the 18 papers presented at both conferences, only eight were selected and invited to contribute to this issue. In order to guarantee the fairness and quality of the selection process, each submission received at least three reviews. As a result, only six of the eight papers were selected to appear in this issue. Such papers significantly extend and improve the original conference contributions.

We would like to thank the editors of SOCA for allowing us to organize this issue; the editorial team of SOCA for their timely and effective support during the review and publication phase; the external anonymous referees for their detailed reports; and the authors of submitted papers for their great effort in preparing their manuscripts and contributing to the success of this issue.