Sir

There is one aspect of Nature's acceptance criteria that your Editorial on peer review (“Three cheers for peers” Nature 439, 118; 2006) does not consider.

The broad audience of Nature forces its editors to pre-screen papers according to how appealing they will be for its readers, even if appeal and importance do not always go hand in hand. This is absolutely legitimate, given the broad character of the journal, given its independence (it is a private enterprise, after all) and given the fact that any author can choose whether to submit papers to Nature or not.

But special consideration is due to the growing weight that authoring papers in Nature is acquiring in personal curricula. Gratifying though this must be for Nature's editors, it has the slightly worrying implication that bright young scientists are beginning to be driven more by the appeal of a potential paper than by its importance — a trend to which the scientific community should find a response.

The long and exemplary relationship between Nature and the scientific community allows me to hope that the journal itself will help in this endeavour.