How long does it take to publish a research paper?

Nature : The experience many researchers have when trying to publish their research results can be stressful, and for some journals the length of the peer-review process seems to be growing substantially. Daniel Himmelstein of the University of California, San Francisco, analyzed submission and acceptance dates for all papers indexed in the PubMed database and found that the median time between submission and acceptance has been roughly 100 days for the past 30 years. In Himmelstein’s data it appears that the longer delays are more common for the journals authors most desired to be published in and in popular open-access journals. Nature‘s turnaround time has increased from 85 days to 150 days over the last decade, and PLoS ONE’s has gone from 37 to 125 days in about the same period. In some fields the delay is less; in physics, for example, the publication of preprints of articles is thought to help increase final print publishing turnaround times. In the biological sciences a group of researchers and publishers is meeting to discuss whether the disciplines should adopt a preprint model for articles.