TITLE: When your paper makes a borderline case for a top journal
QUESTION [25 upvotes]: Say you write a paper that you feel makes a borderline case for publication in a prestigious journal (Annals, Acta, Inventiones, JAMS, etc).  What are the advantages and disadvantages of submitting the paper to the prestigious journal over a less prestigious journal where your paper is very likely to be accepted? My novice take is that there is little downside since if the paper is rejected you can always then submit it to a less prestigious journal. Are there factors I'm not considering? Of course, in most cases, the paper is Arxiv'ed early on so one's claim to the result is never hurt by a lengthy publication process. 
I'd be interested to also hear about the implications on job applications. How much does it hurt a job applicant to have a very good result Arxiv'ed and submitted versus accepted? (Presumably if the validity of the result was a make or break factor for a job the hiring group could take a look at the preprint or talk to an expert in the field. Maybe that is an unrealistic expectation).

REPLY [27 votes]: This requires a conditional response.  First, who is submitting?

Tenured professor:  Not much repurcussion either way.
Worth the wait if you think it deserves publication.
Graduate student:  Some downside to waiting a long time
and not having the thing published come application time, but this can happen
at a lesser journal, too (for grads, the paper is often
submitted only shortly before they are graduating). 
And postdoc hiring is not
as publications-based as tenure-track hiring.  Letters
of recommendation mean more.
Postdoc.  Here, submitting with a high probability of
a rejection after a long wait can be a major gambit.
Mitigating factor:  does the postdoc have other worthy
publications?  If this will be the flagship result,
it's hard not to think that a slightly lesser journal
would have a higher expected yield (in terms of jobs).
Note that it is true that some journals may reject
your paper quickly -- then you can turn around and
submit somewhere else -- but those papers are not really
the marginally-great ones being asked about.

In the end, you are left with a hard decision.
I don't think there's a formula which can help. 
In this case, you either go for broke or you don't.

Collaboration:  decide based on the member with the
most to lose.