Articulating our values to clarify our mission: Inviting community participation

E d i t o r i a l " The mission of The Journal of General Physiology (JGP) is to publish articles that elucidate important biological, chemical , or physical mechanisms of broad physiological significance. The major emphasis is on physiological problems at the cellular and molecular level. " In the 1996 film Jerry Maguire, the title character, a sports management agent, wrote a mission statement entitled " The things we think and do not say: the future of our business. " Life's most important decisions are often based on unarticulated values. Jerry dared to articulate his values, generating applause from his cowork-ers but disdain from the establishment (he was fired as a result). Spelling out our values can be risky, but it is only through critical self-reflection that we can change our direction. As the new Editor of The Journal of General Physiology, I look to our mission statement for the values to guide me. " The mission. .. is to publish articles " offers little direction. In fact, I don't agree that publishing articles is our only mission. Anyone with access to the internet can publish articles. Doesn't our community deserve more? As it continues, our mission statement does little more to articulate our values. The articles we publish should " elucidate important biological, chemical, or physical mechanisms of broad physiological significance, " but how do we define " important " and " significance " ? I assert that an emphasis on " important " work that is " significant " no longer serves us, as these terms have been appropriated by for-profit journals and others who seek to devalue basic science research. In a recent editorial, Marc Kirschner, chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, takes on the myth of significance: " One may be able to recognize good science as it happens, but significant science can only be viewed in the rearview mirror. To pretend otherwise distorts science " (Kirschner, 2013). Does publishing work of " significance " really capture the JGP mission? Could it cause us to miss out on careful, rigorous, thoughtful work whose place in history is not yet clear? The pressure to publish " important " work in high impact journals with ever-increasing standards of " significance " is suspected to underlie, at least in part, the apparent epidemic of nonreproducible results and outright fraud. Kirschner attributes …