The editor of an article is the person who decides whether to desk-reject or seek reviewers, find and coordinate the reviewers, communicate with the authors during the process and so on. That’s standard at all journals afaik. The editor decides on publication according to the journal’s criteria. PNAS does have this special track but one of the authors must be in NAS, and as that author you can’t just submit a bunch of papers in that track, you can use it once a year or something. And most readers of PNAS know this and are suitably sceptical of those papers (and it’s written on the paper if it used that track). The journal started out only accepting papers from NAS members and opened to everyone in the 90s so it’s partly a historical quirk.
The editor of an article is the person who decides whether to desk-reject or seek reviewers, find and coordinate the reviewers, communicate with the authors during the process and so on. That’s standard at all journals afaik. The editor decides on publication according to the journal’s criteria. PNAS does have this special track but one of the authors must be in NAS, and as that author you can’t just submit a bunch of papers in that track, you can use it once a year or something. And most readers of PNAS know this and are suitably sceptical of those papers (and it’s written on the paper if it used that track). The journal started out only accepting papers from NAS members and opened to everyone in the 90s so it’s partly a historical quirk.