Even winning the lottery comes with problems. The Journal of Dermatological Treatment is enjoying the success of being a more and more popular venue for publication of dermatologic treatment observations, studies, and reviews. Along with that success comes a dark side: a backlog of excellent papers waiting to appear in print. That backlog has grown to a painful year.
Perhaps I shouldn't admit this, but editors have control over the timing of manuscript publication. Generally, the articles are published in the order in which they were accepted. This seems like the most egalitarian approach, as well as an easy default. On occasion, however, a truly ‘hot’ article will be published right away (please send us those!).
As active researchers who publish regularly, we editors understand the pain of waiting for articles to appear in print. The modern world does allow us to publish the articles online, where there are no page restrictions, much more quickly, facilitating more immediate public availability of the work. We hope that addresses most, though we recognize not all, concerns about the timing of publication.
Given the page limitations of the physical journal, keeping articles short will help to get them published in a timely way. Since the number of journal pages is fixed, more short articles can be published than long ones. And you never know, when the running order of articles is being made, we may need a one- or two-page article to reach that fixed magic number, so your short article may suddenly move way up in the queue.