A Peer Reviewed Journal Article on WikiLeaks in Under 45 Days

On July 25, 2010 a group known as WikiLeaks publicly released detailed classified information about the U.S. led war in Afghanistan.  Less than 45 days later a team of U.S. political geographers has published a peer-reviewed article analyzing the war logs and plotting the data on maps, showing the evolution of the insurgency over time.  45 days...wow!  The article is here.  Some of you may have submitted law review articles 30 days ago and are still waiting to hear back.  This article was submitted, peer reviewed, accepted, proofed, laid out in galleys for publication, all within 45 days (the editors even delayed publication of the issue to ensure this article was in it). 

Now this is not typical for peer reviewed journals, but it seems they have the ability to turn an article around very quickly when necessary.  Could a law journal turn an article around this quickly?  Or would too much time be wasted determining whether the on-line sources referenced in the piece complied with Rule 18.2.2? 

Here is the abstract:

A team of U.S. political geographers analyzes the secret Afghanistan war logs released by WikiLeaks.org. They offer the chance to examine in detail the dynamics of the conflict in that country. Doing so in a spatial framework is possible because each of the 77,000 events has geographic coordinates and dates. Using cartographic and geostatistical tools, the authors map the changing distribution of the events and compare them to the well-known violent-events ACLED database (see O’Loughlin et al., 2010 in this issue). They conclude that ACLED comprises a representative set of the more comprehensive data in the released files. The released war logs show that the Afghan insurgency spread rapidly in 2008–2009, that the insurgency is moving out of its traditional Pashtun heartlands, and remains mostly rural in location. Hotspot and cluster analysis identifies the key locations of the current war, which indicate that it is relocating to new provinces in Afghanistan while intensifying in the eastern border regions and in the south.