Locked in Editorial Limbo: The Serious Case Against a Peer Review System That Leaves Papers Unassigned for More Than a Year

Publication delays are a pervasive but underexamined structural issue in contemporary science. While peer-review duration has been widely studied, less attention has been paid to an earlier and often invisible bottleneck: the time manuscripts may spend awaiting editorial assignment before review begins. This essay examines systemic drivers of publication delay and their disproportionate impact on early career researchers (ECRs), drawing on empirical evidence and a documented case in which a manuscript remained unassigned to an editor for 380 days prior to peer review initiation. Large-scale studies show that submission-to-publication times frequently exceed 200 days, with substantial variation across disciplines and journals alongside persistent inequities affecting researchers from low- and middle-income countries. These delays reflect a structural mismatch between rapidly increasing submission volumes and a constrained, unevenly distributed reviewer and editorial workforce, compounded by weak incentives for peer-review participation. For early career researchers, prolonged and front-loaded editorial delays can have direct consequences for funding, career progression, and mental health, in a context where graduate students already exhibit elevated levels of anxiety and depression relative to the general population. Publication delay, therefore, should not be understood solely as procedural inefficiency, but as a systemic constraint on the speed, fairness, and accessibility of scientific communication.