Owing to a technical problem in the submission process, selected presentations from the 7th International Conference on Boundary Elements, which took place in Paris, France, in September 2006 (http://beteq.engineeringconferences.net/), will not be published in a separate special issue. Links to these papers as they were published in the journal are listed at the end of this editorial. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.