A professor emeritus recently sent me an article to publish on my web magazine. The turnaround time was around 18 hours and he replied to express his surprise at how quickly his piece was published. In contrast, he has had an article pending at an academic journal for three years now.
Usually this kind of long turn-around time is because it is held up by the referees, not the actual publishing process. That process is too slow (sometimes as much as a few months, but usually more like a few weeks), but it's not 3-years slow.
