Henry Gee has written a post called Editors and the Research Agenda at his blog End of the Pier Show. In the post he describes how an editor does, and doesn’t, decide what to publish. A brief excerpt: “all papers are welcome, simply because some of the most important papers are the most unexpected.” Also, “editors aren’t in the business of shaping science, they are there to select the best papers for their journals. The two are not mutually exclusive, but they are distinct.”