"why a year for peer review for a journal" - it's very very rarely any less than than, often more. The best, more desirable journals (which it is likely Dana Farber would submit to) get hundreds of papers submitted. Most of these journals publish monthly. Once the editors sort through all the submissions to find likely prospects, they have to contact several peer reviewers in the same field to see if they are available to do the reviews. These are most often busy docs/researchers. They don't drop everything to review articles. They would likely get months to respond. They will have questions/comments that then go back to the author to address and rewrite. An article NEVER gets published without some back and forth. Then, the graphs, data etc has to be evaluated and checked. Once everything is done, and the paper edited to conform to that particular journal, they would set a pub date.
This is a very, very long process. A year is nothing to be concerned about.
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