The Harrit response to Pileni's resignation has pretty much been exposed as desperate straw-grasping. The resignation was explicitly because she wasn't informed of the paper. Pileni already had questions about the journal (likely relating to the publication process) which she says were never answered. Pileni also said the journal doesn't appear in an index of reputable journals, which after a search I can confirm appears to be true. It seems she resigned after her suspicions about Bentham were confirmed, and the Harrit paper was simply the straw which broke the camel's back:
They have printed the article without my permission, so when you wrote to me, I did not know that the article had appeared. I cannot accept this, and therefore I have written to Bentham that I resign from all activities with them.
The second EIC after her also resigned after his questions about the publication process were never answered. Funny how Harrit never addresses the resignation of the 2end editor in chief.
I don't believe for a second it went under peer review, as the problems (which become apparent to any person after some searching) with the XEDS readouts, the MEK dissolver, the control paint identification, the sample handling, and experimental design mean the paper's conclusions are at best inconclusive, and at worst the entire endeavor is fraudulent.
The paper has poor experimental design, and doesn't demonstrate what it claims to. <-- Peer review by Dr. Denis Rancourt, PhD level whose taught the techniques used in the paper at the graduate level for over two decades. He states that Harrit and Jones would've failed the course he taught. The paper is that bad.
The main e-mail exchange Rancourt refers to is located here. Rancourt refutes Harrit's response -- which was uploaded to Scribd -- to his peer review.
Harrit refused to supply Rancourt with his alleged clean TEM-EDX data for the red layer of his alleged thermitic chips. He never raised the possibility of artifacts in his 2009 paper, and never referenced the tests he alleges to have done. He also didn't supply the EDX spectra of his alleged "Al-Mg" alloy sample-holder (which Rancourt notes is very unusual and would be a materials science feat in itself). Harrit is basically handwaving away as to why he doesn't have Al background contamination in his EDX readouts.
Harrit never identified the control paint sample he dissolved in MEK in that "experiment" he did to rule out the paint hypothesis. When Jones was asked about the exact identification of the control paint, he dodged the question. The swelling of the "red" layer in the unknown samples is consistent with epoxy-binder behavior. James Millete's FTIR analysis showed that his own comparable"red-gray" chips' spectra were consistent with the reference spectra of an epoxy resin. Millete also found no elemental aluminum in the red layer. This agrees with Dr. Denis Rancourt's comments that the red layer of Harrit's alleged chips could contain little to no aluminum, due to background signal contamination from the stock Al slug that Harrit used when performing EDX, and this is supported by his expert reading of Harrit's data:
The electron hits the sample at the desired location, but if the electrons do not both enter the sample and stay in the sample and if instead they emerge to hit the surrounding Al support, then you will get an Al X-ray signal giving a false elemental Al reading.
-- pg. 3
The peak signals at the red flake edges in Harrit's data strongly indicate what Rancourt calls "electron misbehavior artifacts". The EDX data is contaminated.
Contaminated EDX data = little to no aluminum = no evidence for thermite.
These are all points that would've been raised, had a proper peer review been done.
Apologies I went off tangent a little, but truly the paper is crap.