I am honored to have been selected as the new editor-in-chief of Molecular Pharmacology. My laboratory has published 11 papers in the journal to date, where we always received fair, educated reviews and enthusiasm for our structure-based pharmacological work. It is the first place I think of to send our manuscripts dealing with drug discovery and drug mechanisms. I am grateful to former editor-in-chief Steve Traynelis for first introducing me to the editorial board and to outgoing editor-in-chief Kathryn Meier for taking me on as deputy editor. All of our prior editors, in fact, deserve a huge round of applause for their dedicated service to ASPET and Molecular Pharmacology. I look forward to working with a terrific ASPET publications team, now led by Jacqueline Perry and Maria Pasho, and an outstanding editorial board of working scientists, authors, and reviewers to continue to publish insightful work that helps the world better understand how drugs interact with their targets and their physiologic consequences.

As the editor-in-chief, I want to see Molecular Pharmacology at the forefront of other authors’ minds when considering a target journal. Since the emergence of online publishing, it has become harder to weed through all the newly created journals and find the most appropriate one. Some of these publications are predatory, where the primary objective is to harvest fees from scientists with little regard to the quality of the published work. But there is a less obvious form of predation that has evolved over the same period. This includes the proliferation of journals, some with no apparent new emphasis, under the banner of some of the most well respected publication houses in the life sciences. Many of these feature papers highly relevant to ASPET journals. In addition to absorbing more manuscripts, such proliferation also allows for implementation of a slick rejection/referral system among the journals in the portfolio—no reformatting required—with just a click of a button. Thus, many laboratories, including my own, have optimistically submitted papers to the upper tier and, after rejection, sadly watch the manuscript ping down among lower-ranked journals, like a pachinko ball, until it finally finds a home. As suggested by one of my colleagues at Purdue, one can combat this kind of predation by not immediately clicking that referral button. Instead, one could take some time to reflect about what other time-tested journals might be appropriate, especially those that are well respected in one’s field and those that would be the most impactful for peers and for the professional societies to which one belongs. The bottom line is that many more journals with overlapping foci now compete for an increasingly limited number of high-quality manuscripts. This is the major challenge now faced by Molecular Pharmacology and other societies with their core journals.

Considering this challenge, I introduce for consideration below a few ideas for increasing submissions to Molecular Pharmacology and enhancing its value for future authors.

• Stop Chasing Impact Factors

 There is little one can do about the proliferation of journals that compete for content of interest. We can, however, stop chasing higher impact factors, which are in many cases profoundly influenced by review articles and not primary studies, and take a moment to consider the ramifications of where we publish bedrock studies from our laboratories. ASPET members need to decide collectively to prioritize pharmacology by routinely submitting solid manuscripts and cutting-edge mini-reviews to ASPET journals. In this way, one will not only get a publication in a well regarded journal that is specific to our field, but also support the educational mission and professional development provided by ASPET for our trainees and peers, and in doing so also support the future of pharmacology worldwide.

• Provide Increased Value and Unique Services for Our Authors and Readers

• ○ Peer review process. We currently provide authors with rigorous and thoughtful reviews from experts in closely related fields, such as those who serve on our editorial board of over 100 talented principal and senior investigators. The review process could be further improved by implementing a system in which reviewers and the associate editor enter a consultation process to come to a consensus opinion, thereby creating more consistency among reviews and a clearer description of what the authors should do to improve their manuscript. This change would be especially important if we implement proposals to speed up the time to acceptance, as described below.

• ○ Statistical review. We currently provide authors with a rigorous and somewhat revolutionary system of statistical review by experts on papers that are likely to be accepted. Harvey Motulsky, founder of GraphPad and an author of the popular data analysis program Prism, has spearheaded this effort with the help of Martin Michel and T.J. Murphy, and together they published new statistical guidelines in 2020 that authors are now suggested to follow (Molecular Pharmacology January 2020, 97 (1) 49-60; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1124/mol.119.118927). The main point of this statistical review is to educate authors and our membership; very few papers are rejected based on this review alone. Although the system could be tweaked, I feel that this service should continue because, as the world-leading society devoted to pharmacology, we should be setting the standards for data reporting in the field.

• ○ Speed up time to acceptance. Another way we can provide more value is to make the submission process easier and speed up time to acceptance. It currently takes an average of ∼100 days for a paper to be formally accepted in Molecular Pharmacology. To accelerate this process, we could take on some aspects of an innovative E-Life review policy where papers are guaranteed to be published after an initial stage of expert review. In our case, it might make sense to guarantee publication after the first revision if the associate editor in charge deems that they have made an adequate response to the initial round of review. The final submitted paper, regardless, would ultimately be published alongside the anonymous reviewer comments, which would serve as an incentive for authors to improve the rigor of their paper. Under this system, second and third revisions might no longer be necessary. This idea will be debated here, but if the above system were implemented, we could take weeks off the average time to acceptance. Whatever policy we end up with in this realm, we will be careful to maintain high standards for our publications.

• Emphasize Structural Approaches

 As a journal devoted to the molecular aspects of drug-target interactions, we are in a terrific position to take advantage of the explosion of atomic structures currently being determined by X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy. Both approaches have witnessed recent technological innovations that make it easier for scientists to not only resolve native ligands and drug leads bound to their targets but also determine structures of membrane proteins, which constitute the largest class of drug targets in the human genome. Many of the resulting papers should be corralled into the pages of Molecular Pharmacology. To this end, we will actively promote our journal at meetings devoted to biophysics and structural biology. I will encourage more principal investigators using these cutting-edge techniques to study drug action to join our editorial board. With a larger ensemble of talented structural biologists on our board, authors using these approaches will know they can get a fair, insightful, and thorough review from our journal.

But just as it became apparent that some papers being submitted to Molecular Pharmacology needed to rethink the way statistical analysis was performed, the surge of new structural data being generated, in particular by cryo-EM, also must be properly validated. At moderate resolutions, it is easy for less experienced users to over- or misinterpret data, such as the way bound ligands are modeled or even if a ligand is bound at all. Mistakes in the modeling of lead compounds in their binding sites can easily cause drug development programs go astray at great cost. For this reason, we have recently begun asking authors to provide coordinate files, maps, and validation reports for all unpublished models, computational or experimental, so that our experts can examine them directly. We can further require authors to use simple cutting-edge validation tools to help confirm that their models contain few major errors.

• Introduce New Topics

 Finally, we are always interested in new topics from cutting-edge areas of molecular pharmacology. To this end, we strongly encourage authors to submit presubmission inquiries if their papers are from areas that have not been previously emphasized in Molecular Pharmacology.

Molecular Pharmacology has provided my colleagues, my trainees, and me with great support and value over many years. I look forward to doing the same in my role as editor-in-chief. Please reach out and share thoughts, innovative ideas, and comments on what is working well and what is not to molpharmacoleditor@aspet.org.

John J.G. Tesmer,

Editor