The speediness was only possible?

Good things come to those who wait. But now that the Large Hadron Collider has restarted after undergoing more than a year of repairs, physicists are racing to analyse the data. Just days after the first protons were smashed together at the LHC, the first paper on the results has been accepted to a journal.

The first collisions took place on Monday, 23 November; by Saturday, a paper had been uploaded to the arxiv server, where physicists often publish their results prior to formal publication. Three days later, it had been accepted by the European Journal of Physics.

The paper came from researchers working on ALICE, one of six experiments at the world's most muscular particle smasher, which is located near Geneva, Switzerland.

"It's probably a record," says David Evans of the University of Birmingham, leader of the UK contingent at ALICE. "Of course, it had a lot to do with the kudos of being first."

The speediness was only possible because the collaboration had approved the text of the paper in advance, leaving just a few gaps to fill in once the number-crunchers had analysed 284 of the first ALICE collisions.

The problem is that I fail to understand the relationship between "only possible" and "because".