Raff, Johnson, and Walter ("Painful publishing," Letters, 4 July, p. 36) make some excellent points about how peer reviewers for journals should conduct themselves. There is a fine line between being too demanding by requiring a lot of extra work and making sure a paper with important results gets out to the scientific public in a timely way.

In my laboratory, there is no pressure to publish in journals like Science, Nature, or Cell because we simply do not send our manuscripts to them anymore, no matter how important or high-impact we think the work may be. We have found that there is an excellent group of other, first-line journals of cell biology for which we do not need to subject ourselves to the type of competition required for publication in these three journals.

When I have served on peer-review panels, I have fought against the common practice of relating grant awards to publication in high-profile journals such as Science, Nature, and Cell. It is the impact and importance of the work that matters (thereby requiring the peer reviewers to read the applicant's papers quite thoroughly), not where the work is published.