Less sad than the recent Note on publishing a scientific comment… 
As I am in a constant process of trying to understand the requirements for publishing high-impact scientific papers better (slow process… ;-), I am always eager to see what others write about it.
Recently, I linked to some PLOS editorials about Ten simple rules for nearly everything, including writing papers.
Along this line, the presentation given by the Phys. Rev. Lett. Editor Manolis Antonoyiannakis in Japan end of last year, is very interesting. In addition to hints for using the right phrasing when writing about scientific results, he also gives some insight – from the viewpoint of the Editorial Office of a high impact phyics journal – into the inner workings of paper predecision (by Editor) and general acceptance rate. Antonoyiannakis also mentions additional sources, for instance What editors want by Lynn Worsham (Subscription required; summary here) and Writing a Paper by George M. Whitesides.
[Update 3.9.2009] Other interesting resources: two PRL editorials, Successful Letters (Mar 13, 2008) and Is PRL Too Large to Have an Impact? (Feb 13, 2009), interview with Gene Sprouse, Editor-in-Chief of APS publications.
[Update 17.9.2009]: recently published researcher perspective at ArsTechnica.
Afterwards, the only thing left to do is performing significant research, and writing a paper… ;-)
[Update 8.10.2009] Another question is where to publish. Interesting insights are given by Martin Heintzelman and Diego Nocetti in their paper on Where should we submit our paper? An analysis of journal submission strategies (via the blog The Great Beyond).
Notes on Disordered Matter 