Is a year necessarily a long time for peer review, especially on a subject which can only be tested every 12 months? If the authors wish to keep track of the daily GFS updates during October via the online equivalent of the back of a cigarette packet, well, that's up to them. If I were employed academically and were engaged in some slightly oddball research, I'd be inclined to keep it away from my employer's official media too. That way your employer will not get needlessly embarrassed if it all goes wrong.
Creating a paper can take a year even once you have a lot of the data and Peer review can take a couple of years on top of that. These are at the longer ends of the spectrum.
Once you have some data and a hypothesis you spend a few months writing a paper and proving results. You will then circulate the paper with peers and incorporate their feedback, this can take another 3-6 months. You then might need to collect more data, or re-write large sections.
You then submit to the journal- typically journals want to give you a review back in 90 days but often it can be more like 6-9 months! Your paper might be rejected then based on the reviews. If there is constructive feedback you will spend some months incorporating that and then sending the paper to a new journal where you will await the same 3-9 month period. These steps can be repeated many times until you ae lucky or give up.
Once you have a paper initially accepted with revision you then typically have 3 months to make the changes and improvements. You submit the payer and will wait up to another 3 months to hear back on whether the changes were acceptable. If they are then there is still some back and forth to sort out minor issues, this can take a month. If you are lucky they will publish the paper online at that point - but some journals will only put the paper online once it is in print, which might not be for a year or longer while the journal organizes its papers. However, even when hearing back from the revised paper there can be pitfalls: quite possibly they will have deemed that you have resolved the reviewer concerns so the paper is rejected - you then start back at square one and find a new journal. Rarer still but it some fields it is very common that you will have to make more significant changes and submit it back to the journal, each time inuring 3- 6 months delay. There can be 2-3 rounds of this. Even after all of that you might get the paper rejected at the 3rd round of reviewing a couple of years down the road. This is when you quit academia and get a real salary in industry.
Of course it is possible to go from an idea to a published paper under 12 months but there are many, may factors.
Having a correlation of 0.9 might not be enough to get a publication, the reviewers may want a sound theory about why the correlation exists, the causation, and a detailed model. Developing the model can take months and months. Even if everything is scientifically sound there are many reasons for rejection. I reject papers if there is a certain number of English mistake reached by the first page for example. A paper might also be rejected because the editor is not interested in that kind of work in their journal. You might get reviewed by competitors who don't want you to get published before them. Many editors are just incompetent fools who dont read the paper or the reviewer comments and will just reject if one of the reviewers says reject. And then their is the whole political side of it - there are academic niches based on culture/country where people only accept papers from their in-network colleagues.