Since the birth of first ever one in 1665, academic journals have long been recognized as one of the important formal channels for scholarly communication. Followed by the introduction of electronic journal, scholarly communication with significant reformation steps into a brand new era after singing the same old tune for hundreds years. It is therefore interesting to see how the electronic format affects time efficiency of communication via academic journals. In this study, differences on the time of communication between articles published under the open access (OA) model and in the article in press (AIP) format will be analyzed based on the characteristics of publication lag and first-citation speed. The correlation of publication lag and first-citation lag to the journal evaluation indicators will also be explored. A total of 24,176 journal articles collected from 64 journals indexed in the JCR Energy and Fuel field, one of the hot research topics recently, are selected as research objects. Publication and first-citation lags of these articles are calculated separately based on the submission date, revised date, accepted date, publication date, and month of the first-citation occur. Results demonstrate that the OA mechanism can influence the lag of publication, but it does not form a citation advantage. The AIP mechanism affects citation speed but is not significantly related to publication lag. It can be seen that OA and AIP mechanisms contribute to the efficiency of scholarly communication at different stages.
