The paper is bunk because it was published in a non-peer-reviewed vanity publication.
There is absolutely no evidence that The Open Chemical Physics Journal is a vanity publication. It is an open journal which means anyone can read the papers within it for free. Closed journals require you to purchase an expensive subscription in order to read the papers. Open journals instead charge the authors a fee to submit a paper. Some open journals only charge the fee when the paper is accepted for publication. Open journals are a superior format because they allow scientific data to be freely accessible to everyone instead of being closed off to a small minority. This journal was chosen because it is open. That means everyone on Earth can read the paper for free. Only subscribers can read articles from closed journals. Everyone else can only read abstracts. This paper needs to be read by everyone and that is exactly why it should have been published in an open journal.
There is absolutely no evidence that The Open Chemical Physics Journal is not a peer-reviewed journal. All the evidence suggests that it is in fact a peer-reviewed journal. It looks like a peer-reviewed journal and acts like a peer-reviewed journal. Bentham, the publisher, says that it is peer-reviewed. The journal editors and the journal contributors say it is peer-reviewed. So until someone provides evidence to the contrary The Open Chemical Physics Journal is, as far as we know, a peer-reviewed journal.
Recently Philip Davis submitted a fake manuscript to another Bentham open access journal [3], The Open Information Science Journal. The paper was created by a computer program named SCIgen and contained nonsensical statements. This paper was allegedly accepted after undergoing peer review. Obviously the peer review process appears to have been conspicuously absent in this particular case. "Debunkers" of the thermite paper take this as proof that no Bentham open publications have peer-review. However, Davis also admits that a similar submission was rejected by another Bentham journal, The Open Software Engineering Journal. So clearly there is only evidence that one Bentham journal, at one time, had a problem with its peer review process. What the "debunkers" have put forth is merely a fallacious guilt by association argument, in particular they commit the hasty generalization logical fallacy [4]. In other words, there is absolutely no substance to this argument. Bentham publishes over 200 scientific journals [5]. To say all Bentham journals are not peer-reviewed because one journal at one time had a problem with the peer review process is like saying all coins are green because you found copper oxide on a penny.
