Balancing excellence and utility

The perennial challenge for many journals that publish mainstream science is to balance excellence with utility. Journals facilitate communication among user communities, while upholding international standards for scientific soundness. Judging whether a paper is excellent is important. Whether a paper is more excellent than another is a conundrum, because qualitative properties are not quantifiable. Here, we discuss the common view that publishing is a form of conceptual sharing in which peer-reviewed information fosters discussion and facilitates current studies. We have a collective mission to facilitate options for starting these discussions and accommodate authors by publishing their work.